Reasons for abortion

Reasons for abortion. (February 8, 2005) News report of BBC website. Retrieved October 20, 2008, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/abortion/legal/when_1.shtml

Some societies ban abortion almost completely while others permit it in certain cases. Such societies usually lay down a maximum age after which the foetus must not be aborted, regardless of the circumstances. At various times some of the following have been allowed in some societies:

abortion for the sake of the mother's health
including her mental health

abortion where a pregnancy is the result of a crime
such as crimes like rape, incest, or child abuse

abortion where the child of the pregnancy would have an ' unacceptable quality of life' such as cases where the child would have serious physical handicaps, serious genetic problems, serious mental defects.

abortion for social reasons, including:
poverty,
mother unable to cope with a child (or another child),
mother being too young to cope with a child

abortion as a matter of government policy
as a way of regulating population size
as a way of regulating groups within a population
as a way of improving the population

Most opponents of abortion agree that abortion for the sake of the mother's health can be morally acceptable if there is a real risk of serious damage to the mother. Abortion for social reasons is usually least acceptable to opponents.

Birth control and disability
A substitute for contraception

Some methods of contraception in fact amount to abortion during the very earliest stage of a pregnancy. The section below only deals with abortion after the first week of pregnancy.
Some societies have used abortion as a substitute for adequate provision of contraception, or quite deliberately to regulate population size.

In 1965, a United Nations Conference on World Population in Belgrade said that abortion was the chief method of birth control in the world at that time.

Most western supporters of abortion rights do not support abortions carried out for such reasons - or at least not as explicit public policy. However some doctors do argue that abortion should be part of a country's contraception policy. They say that a society that believes that people should plan their families must allow women to end unwanted pregnancies, in order to deal with failures of birth control.

Abortion and disability

Some ethicists dislike the argument that abortion should be allowed where the baby, if born, would suffer from physical or mental handicaps. They say that allowing this as a reason for abortion is offensive to disabled people; because it implies that they, and their lives, are less worthwhile than the lives of 'normal' people. And some people with disabilities that could be put forward as grounds for abortion argue that they would much rather be alive than have been killed in the womb.

Abortion and eugenics

Abortion has been used in the past to stop the growth of population groups, or racial groups regarded as genetically 'inferior'. This is now regarded as a most serious breach of human rights and a criminal act.
Abortion has been used in the past to stop people with various genetic defects from having children. When this is done as a matter of public policy it is now regarded as a most serious breach of human rights and a criminal act.

Abortion and gender selection

In some countries, particularly India there is a major problem with 'female foeticide' - deliberately aborting foetuses that would be born as girls.
For sociological and economic reasons parents in some cultures prefer to have boy babies. When parents can discover the gender of the foetus in advance, they sometimes request the termination of a pregnancy solely because the foetus is female.
While selective abortion for gender preference is illegal in India, the low proportion of female births relative to male births, together with other evidence, makes it certain that female foeticide is practised on a large scale.