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Kylee Hunt
Kate Kimball, Instructor
English 2010
2 April 2013
Argument Essay: Abortion
Life is, stated by Joanne Boucher, “A material complex or individual characterized by the
capacity to perform certain functional activities, including metabolism, growth, reproduction,
and some form of responsiveness and adaptation.” This quote explains to us when life first
begins. In other words it is describing a human being. Our world today is full of unsolved,
troublesome and controversial issues. Most of them relate to our morals, ethics and religion, thus
creating a very strong yes and no, or good and bad side. Abortion has a very prominent black
and white side, such as choosing pro-life or pro-choice but also contains traces of each in the
alternating color, such as pro-reason. This shows that if you were to come to any kind of
conclusion on abortion, there would still be a downside to it, and that is primarily why the world
cannot agree on this sensitive and emotional issue. There are many arguments that can be made
about abortion, one being that life begins after the first breath or at X amount of weeks, but I will
argue that every human being has the right to live and life occurs at the point of conception and
this fact should be protected by the law making abortions illegal. This argument will prove that
the world can and should agree on this sensitive and emotional issue.
Although I am arguing that life begins at conception, I would like go visit the other side and
view other biases that are different from my own. Many pro-choicers claim that life begins postdelivery, after the first breath outside of the womb. The video, “Proud to be Pro-choice,” was
made with information coming from Planned Parenthood. It’s trying to inform and persuade the
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viewers as why Pro-choice is the correct way to view abortion. The arguments that are addressed
in this video are: Women being more than a fetus, illegal abortions are discriminatory against
women, and that children will bear children. Although all of these arguments are problematic in
some way, I will put my focus on the two main arguments in the video which are: legal abortions
protect woman’s health and proving when the fetus is considered to be alive. The first claim is
arguing that women with health issues are forced to go along with pregnancy that ends up
hurting them for the rest of their lives or it will eventually kill them. They say that prohibiting
abortions won’t stop them. They declare that women who want abortions will get them even
when they are outlawed and the abortions that are performed are dangerous and end their own
lives. The second main argument states that pro-choicers in this film consider life to begin after
the fetus has taken their first breath outside of the womb. Although the fetus is growing and
dividing inside the mother, it doesn’t become a “person” until it inhales for the first time. These
are problematic because science has proven both of these main arguments to be incorrect; they
will be proven incorrect throughout this paper.
John Biggers, a member of the Laboratory of Human Reproduction and Reproductive
Biology at Harvard Medical School, wrote an article, “When Does Life Begin,” to explain when
a fetus is considered to be alive. Biggers states that as soon as the parent’s sex cells come
together they start dividing into what they are programmed to do which is make a human being.
Biggers states that his scientific studies have shown that a human is made and considered to be
alive when the sex cells come together; proving the “Proud to be Pro-choice” claim (life begins
after the first breath) to be incorrect. After about three days of division the zygote, a living
organism, goes and plants itself into the lining of the mother’s uterus where it continues
development. Scientists say this is a hard concept for people to accept because they refer to the
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zygote as a cell and cells in our body die all the time and people don’t consider cells to be living.
After explaining and visiting many arguments Biggers uses a different approach to prove that life
beings at conception. He uses the U.S. Constitution as a statement to pronounce that lives are
protected by our Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment was designed to end slavery and
guarantee the rights of former slaves. It states that all persons born or naturalized in the United
States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States nor shall any state
deprive that person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor to deny the
jurisdiction to any person the equal protection of the laws. The strategy behind the amendment to
the U.S. Constitution proposed by the National Right to Life Movement is to ensure that the
Fourteenth Amendment applies to all human beings at the point of conception.
The committee of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton removed the protection of a person
from the unborn. They also say this: in restoring the protection, this section ensures protection of
the unborn as a person from the commencement of fertilization since there is no stage of
biological development of the unborn that would be outside of the protection of this amendment.
Biggers proves through his article that the protection of lives, even at the point of conception, is
in our amendment and no one should be allowed to take the right of our protection of life away
from us; once again proving the “Proud to be Pro-choice” claim to be incorrect.
Chris Meyers, the author of, The Fetal Position, says that life began, as did the life of
every other human being, when the fusion of egg and sperm produced a new, complete, living
organism — an embryonic human being. People were never specifically an ovum or a sperm
cell, those were both functionally and genetically parts of other human beings — the parents. But
life started as an embryo, just as there was life as an adolescent, a child, an infant, and a fetus. By
a directed process, humans develop from the embryonic stage into and through the fetal, infant,
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child, and adolescent stages of development and ultimately into adulthood. Growing up doesn’t
make people more human. We are just the same amount of human at any stage in life just like
when we were an embryo. He also visits the idea that women who want to end their child’s life
through an abortion are determined to do so (as stated earlier by “Proud to be Pro-choice”).
Meyers and other Psychiatrists think that being pregnant and giving life to someone is a gift from
God and that it is supposed to happen. Even if women are raped or too young to have a child, or
whatever their circumstances are, they should be grateful they have the opportunity to give life
and they shouldn’t be searching for ways to end their pregnancy that could potentially be
harmful to their health. The women should think of adoption as the only answer. Abortion
shouldn’t even be an option for women who don’t have a medical condition that doesn’t allow
them to carry a child. Doctors and many Psychiatrists, including Meyers, have established when
life actually begins and why the claim that abortion is harmful to a woman’s health is
problematic and wrong. Meyers hopes to bring people to the realization that life happens at the
point of conception and abortion should never be an option to women who are healthy enough to
be pregnant.
Joanne Boucher wrote “Ultrasound: A Window to the Womb; Obstetric Ultrasound and
the Abortion Rights Debate,” to prove when the fetus is considered to be alive. She explores
ultrasound technology as it relates to the abortion debate, specifically by the interpretation given
to ultrasound images by patients of abortion. The meaning of the anti-abortion approach is
accurately shown through the videotape, Ultrasound: A Window to the Womb, which Boucher
uses to represent her arguments. The points of this videotape are analyzed in order to illustrate
the assumptions about the female body and about the access to truth shown through the scientific
technology (ultrasound) for abortionists. Boucher States that the ultrasound is a great tool that
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can teach us about development all throughout the different stages. It shows the live cell growing
proving that abortion is murder and should illegalized. This was said by Boucher, “the birth of a
human life occurs at the moment of conception when the mother’s egg or ovum is fertilized by
one of the father’s sperm. During this act of conception, the two cells become a single living cell,
a unique individual who never existed before in history and will never be duplicated again.” She
is saying that the parent’s sex cells, the ovum and the sperm, are made to come together and
develop into a human being; their purpose is to create a living person. At that exact point, when
the sex cells come together, we have life. Boucher made this video to educate viewers. She wants
to uncover the curiosity people have about abortion that by seeing will hopefully result in
believing through the ultrasound technique. She wants people to take a stand against abortion
and realize that once the man’s sperm correlates with the women’s egg there is potential for a
human life, that would otherwise not be there, and no one should be allowed to take that away.
There are many sides and opinions that go along with abortion and it is obviously a very
controversial issue. I have shown the main opposing arguments shown in “Proud to be Prochoice, such as, abortions are hurting women’s health and when a fetus is alive, but shown by
Biggers, Meyers, and Boucher, the truth is that abortion shouldn’t be an option to healthy women
and that life begins at conception. Science has proven that the zygote is a living organism that
divides and grows throughout the full term of pregnancy. It is a living organism, human being,
zygote, fetus, child, baby, whatever we choose to call it; it is alive as soon as the sperm comes in
contact with the egg. The sole purpose of the sex cells coming together is to create life that
would otherwise not be there. Taking away the life of a fetus is murder and it should be against
the law and people who do get abortions, for other reasons other than they aren’t healthy enough,
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should be treated the same way as a murder who takes a life of a person regardless of what their
age is.
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Works Cited
Boucher, Joanne. “Ultrasound: A Window to the Womb: Obstetric Ultrasound and the Abortion
Rights Debate.” Journal of Medical Humanities 25.1 (2004): 15.
Biggers, John. “When Does Life Begin? Congress Has Asked the Unanswerable.” The Sciences,
(1981): p10.
Meyers, Chris. The Fetal Position New York: Prometheus Books, 2010. Print.
Planned Parenthood. “Proud to be Pro-choice.” Youtube. 15 April 2013. Web.