Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. It struck down many U.S. state and federal abortion laws, and prompted an ongoing national debate in the United States about whether and to what extent abortion should be legal, who should decide the legality of abortion, what methods the Supreme Court should use in constitutional adjudication, and what the role of religious and moral views in the political sphere should be. Roe v. Wade reshaped U.S. politics, dividing much of the United States into abortion rights and anti-abortion movements, while activating grassroots movements on both sides.
Libertarians promote individual liberty and seek to minimize the role of the state. The abortion debate is mainly within right-libertarianism between cultural liberals and cultural conservatives as left-libertarians generally see it as a non-issue as they support legal access to abortion as part of their general support for individual rights, especially in regard to what they consider to be a woman's right to control her body. Religious right and intellectual conservatives have attacked such libertarians for supporting abortion rights, especially since the demise of the Soviet Union. Libertarian conservatives claim libertarian principles such as the non-aggression principle apply to human beings from conception and that the universal right to life applies to fetuses in the womb. Thus, some of those individuals express opposition to legal abortion.
Abortion is legal throughout the United States and its territories, although restrictions and accessibility vary from state to state. Abortion is a controversial and divisive issue in the society, culture and politics of the U.S., and various anti-abortion laws have been in force in each state since at least 1900.
The abortion debate is the ongoing controversy surrounding the moral, legal, and religious status of induced abortion. The sides involved in the debate are the self-described "pro-choice" and "pro-life" movements. "Pro-choice" emphasizes the right of women to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy. "Pro-life" emphasizes the right of the embryo or fetus to gestate to term and be born. Both terms are considered loaded in mainstream media, where terms such as "abortion rights" or "anti-abortion" are generally preferred. Each movement has, with varying results, sought to influence public opinion and to attain legal support for its position.
Feminists for Life of America (FFL) is a non-profit, anti-abortion feminist, non-governmental organization (NGO). Established in 1972, and now based in Alexandria, Virginia, the organization describes itself as "shaped by the core feminist values of justice, non-discrimination, and non-violence". FFL publishes a biannual magazine, The American Feminist, and aims to reach young women, college students in particular.
The paternal rights and abortion issue is an extension of both the abortion debate and the fathers' rights movement. Abortion is becoming a factor for disagreement and lawsuit between partners.
The United States anti-abortion movement contains elements opposing induced abortion on both moral and sectarian grounds and supports its legal prohibition or restriction. Advocates generally argue that human life begins at conception and that the human zygote is a person and therefore has a right to life. The anti-abortion movement includes a variety of organizations, with no single centralized decision-making body. There are diverse arguments and rationales for the anti-abortion stance. Some anti-abortion activists allow for some permissible abortions, including therapeutic abortions, in exceptional circumstances such as incest, rape, severe fetal defects or when the woman's health is at risk.
"A Defense of Abortion" is a moral philosophy paper by Judith Jarvis Thomson first published in Philosophy & Public Affairs in 1971. Granting for the sake of argument that the fetus has a right to life, Thomson uses thought experiments to argue that the fetus's right to life does not trump the pregnant woman's right to have jurisdiction over her body, and that induced abortion is therefore not morally impermissible. Her argument has many critics on both sides of the abortion debate, yet continues to receive defense. Thomson's imaginative examples and controversial conclusions have made "A Defense of Abortion" perhaps "the most widely reprinted essay in all of contemporary philosophy".
Pregnancy options counseling is a form of counseling that provides information and support regarding pregnancy. Women seeking pregnancy options counseling are typically doing so in the case of an unplanned or unintended pregnancy. Limited access to birth control and family planning resources, as well as misuse of birth control are some of the major contributing factors to unintended pregnancies around the world. In 2012, the global rate of unintended pregnancies was estimated to be 40 percent, or eighty-five million pregnancies.
Christianity and abortion has a long and complex history, and there are a variety of positions taken by contemporary Christian denominations on the topic. There is no explicit statement about abortion in either the Old Testament or the New Testament books of the Christian Bible. While some writers say that early Christians held different beliefs at different times about abortion, others say that, in spite of the silence of the New Testament on the issue, they condemned abortion at any point of pregnancy as a grave sin, a condemnation that they maintained even when some of them did not qualify as homicide the elimination of a fetus not yet "formed" and animated by a human soul. Some authors, such as ethicist Benjamin Wiker, have contrasted the prohibition of abortion in later Christian societies with the availability of abortion that was present in earlier Roman society, arguing that this reflects a wider condemnation of pagan practices.
In Judaism, views on abortion draw primarily upon the legal and ethical teachings of the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, the case-by-case decisions of responsa, and other rabbinic literature. While all major Jewish religious movements allow abortion in order to save the life or health of a pregnant woman, authorities differ on when and whether it is permitted in other cases.
The excommunication of Margaret McBride occurred with the sanctioning by the American religious sister in November 2009 of an abortion at a Roman Catholic hospital in Phoenix. It was lifted in December 2011. Her decision and her subsequent excommunication aroused controversy in the areas of medical ethics and Catholic theology.
Pregnancy is a potential result of rape. It has been studied in the context of war, particularly as a tool for genocide, as well as other unrelated contexts, such as rape by a stranger, statutory rape, incest, and underage pregnancy. The current scientific consensus is that rape is at least as likely to lead to pregnancy as consensual sexual intercourse, with some studies suggesting rape may actually result in higher rates of pregnancy than consensual intercourse.
Abortion-rights movements, also referred to as pro-choice movements, advocate for legal access to induced abortion services. It is the argument against the pro-life movement. The issue of induced abortion remains divisive in public life, with recurring arguments to liberalize or to restrict access to legal abortion services. Abortion-rights supporters themselves are divided as to the types of abortion services that should be available and to the circumstances, for example different periods in the pregnancy such as late term abortions, in which access may be restricted.
Maternal somatic support after brain death occurs when a brain dead patient is pregnant and her body is kept alive to deliver a fetus. It occurs very rarely internationally. Even among brain dead patients, in a U.S. study of 252 brain dead patients from 1990–96, only 5 (2.8%) cases involved pregnant women between 15 and 45 years of age.
Pregnancy options counseling is a form of counseling to help a woman come to a decision regarding a troubling or unintended pregnancy. In the United States, approximately 51% of the six million annual pregnancies are unintended. A majority of the women affected by an unintended pregnancy are aged 20–24, poor or low income, or a member of a minority group. Unintended pregnancy rates are generally higher in the South and Southwest regions of the United States and densely populated areas. A lack of family planning, limited access to birth control, and inconsistent use of birth control are three of the contributing factors to unintended pregnancy.
Mellet v Ireland is a finding from the United Nations Human Rights Committee that Ireland's abortion laws violated human rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights by banning abortion in cases of fatal foetal abnormality and forcing her to travel to the United Kingdom for an abortion.
Abortion in Connecticut is legal. 67% of adults said in a poll by the Pew Research Center that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Abortions took place early in the state's history. People at that time talked about abortions using euphemisms. The death of Sarah Grosvenor following unsuccessful abortion resulted in a prosecution in colonial Connecticut. Connecticut became the first statue to criminalize abortion after codifying its common law in 1821. Later, such laws were justified as trying to protect the life of the women from bad actors providing unsafe abortion services. The state was one of ten states in 2007 to have a customary informed consent provision for abortions. In 1965, the US Supreme Court heard the case of Griswold v. Connecticut. The Supreme Court struck laws the banned the sale of, use of and giving of prescriptions for contraceptives, even for married couples. The US Supreme Court's decision in 1973's Roe v. Wade ruling meant the state could no longer regulate abortion in the first trimester. In 2019, state law said, “the decision to terminate a pregnancy prior to the viability of the fetus shall be solely that of the pregnant woman in consultation with her physician.”
Jon Hansen is an American attorney serving as a Representative for the 25th Legislative District in the South Dakota House of Representatives. A member of the Republican Party, Hansen previously served as a Representative for District 25 in 2011–2013. Hansen currently serves as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and as a House Majority Whip.
Sandra Cano, better known by the legal pseudonym "Mary Doe," was the plaintiff in the lawsuit case Doe v. Bolton (1970), the companion case to Roe v. Wade (1973).
