abortion problem and solution essay

September 1, 2018

Abortion Is a Problem to Be Solved, Not a Moral Issue

Education and birth control are slowly making the politics less relevant

By Michael Shermer

Izhar Cohen

In May of this year the pro-life/pro-choice controversy leapt back into headlines when Ireland overwhelmingly approved a referendum to end its constitutional ban on abortion. Around the same time, the Trump administration proposed that Title X federal funding be withheld from abortion clinics as a tactic to reduce the practice, a strategy similar to that of Texas and other states to shut down clinics by burying them in an avalanche of regulations, which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down in 2016 as an undue burden on women for a constitutionally guaranteed right. If the goal is to attenuate abortions, a better strategy is to reduce unwanted pregnancies. Two methods have been proposed: abstinence and birth control.

Abstinence would obviate abortions just as starvation would forestall obesity. There is a reason no one has proposed chastity as a solution to overpopulation. Sexual asceticism doesn't work, because physical desire is nearly as fundamental as food to our survival and flourishing. A 2008 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health entitled “Abstinence-Only and Comprehensive Sex Education and the Initiation of Sexual Activity and Teen Pregnancy” found that among American adolescents ages 15 to 19, “abstinence-only education did not reduce the likelihood of engaging in vaginal intercourse” and that “adolescents who received comprehensive sex education had a lower risk of pregnancy than adolescents who received abstinence-only or no sex education.” A 2011 PLOS ONE paper analyzing “Abstinence-Only Education and Teen Pregnancy Rates” in 48 U.S. states concluded that “increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth rates,” controlling for socioeconomic status, educational attainment and ethnicity.

Most telling, a 2013 paper entitled “Like a Virgin (Mother): Analysis of Data from a Longitudinal, US Population Representative Sample Survey,” published in BMJ reported that 45 of the 7,870 American women studied between 1995 and 2009 said they become pregnant without sex . Who were these immaculately conceiving parthenogenetic Marys? They were twice as likely as other pregnant women to have signed a chastity pledge, and they were significantly more likely to report that their parents had difficulties discussing sex or birth control with them.

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When women are educated and have access to birth-control technologies, pregnancies and, eventually, abortions decrease. A 2003 study on the “Relationships between Contraception and Abortion,” published in International Family Planning Perspectives , concluded that abortion rates declined as contraceptive use increased in seven countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Bulgaria, Turkey, Tunisia and Switzerland). In six other nations (Cuba, Denmark, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea and the U.S.), contraceptive use and abortion rates rose simultaneously, but overall levels of fertility were falling during the period studied. After fertility levels stabilized, contraceptive use continued to increase, and abortion rates fell.

Something similar happened in Turkey between 1988 and 1998, when abortion rates declined by almost half when unreliable forms of birth control (for one, the rhythm method) were replaced by more modern technologies (for example, condoms). Public health consultant Pinar Senlet, who conducted the 2001 study published in International Family Planning Perspectives , and her colleagues reported that “marked reductions in the number of abortions have been achieved in Turkey through improved contraceptive use rather than increased use.”

To be fair, the multivariable mesh of correlations in all these studies makes inferring direct causal links difficult for social scientists to untangle. But as I read the research, when women have limited sex education and no access to contraception, they are more likely to get pregnant, which leads to higher abortion rates. When women are educated about and have access to effective contraception, as well as legal and medically safe abortions, they initially use both strategies to control family size, after which contraception alone is often all that is needed and abortion rates decline.

Admittedly, deeply divisive moral issues are involved. Abortion does end a human life, so it should not be done without grave consideration for what is at stake, as we do with capital punishment and war. Likewise, the recognition of equal rights, especially reproductive rights, should be acknowledged by all liberty-loving people. But perhaps progress for all human life could be more readily realized if we were to treat abortion as a problem to be solved rather than a moral issue over which to condemn others. As gratifying as the emotion of moral outrage is, it does little to bend the moral arc toward justice.

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How the Right to Legal Abortion Changed the Arc of All Women’s Lives

By Katha Pollitt

I’ve never had an abortion. In this, I am like most American women. A frequently quoted statistic from a recent study by the Guttmacher Institute, which reports that one in four women will have an abortion before the age of forty-five, may strike you as high, but it means that a large majority of women never need to end a pregnancy. (Indeed, the abortion rate has been declining for decades, although it’s disputed how much of that decrease is due to better birth control, and wider use of it, and how much to restrictions that have made abortions much harder to get.) Now that the Supreme Court seems likely to overturn Roe v. Wade sometime in the next few years—Alabama has passed a near-total ban on abortion, and Ohio, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Missouri have passed “heartbeat” bills that, in effect, ban abortion later than six weeks of pregnancy, and any of these laws, or similar ones, could prove the catalyst—I wonder if women who have never needed to undergo the procedure, and perhaps believe that they never will, realize the many ways that the legal right to abortion has undergirded their lives.

Legal abortion means that the law recognizes a woman as a person. It says that she belongs to herself. Most obviously, it means that a woman has a safe recourse if she becomes pregnant as a result of being raped. (Believe it or not, in some states, the law allows a rapist to sue for custody or visitation rights.) It means that doctors no longer need to deny treatment to pregnant women with certain serious conditions—cancer, heart disease, kidney disease—until after they’ve given birth, by which time their health may have deteriorated irretrievably. And it means that non-Catholic hospitals can treat a woman promptly if she is having a miscarriage. (If she goes to a Catholic hospital, she may have to wait until the embryo or fetus dies. In one hospital, in Ireland, such a delay led to the death of a woman named Savita Halappanavar, who contracted septicemia. Her case spurred a movement to repeal that country’s constitutional amendment banning abortion.)

The legalization of abortion, though, has had broader and more subtle effects than limiting damage in these grave but relatively uncommon scenarios. The revolutionary advances made in the social status of American women during the nineteen-seventies are generally attributed to the availability of oral contraception, which came on the market in 1960. But, according to a 2017 study by the economist Caitlin Knowles Myers, “The Power of Abortion Policy: Re-Examining the Effects of Young Women’s Access to Reproductive Control,” published in the Journal of Political Economy , the effects of the Pill were offset by the fact that more teens and women were having sex, and so birth-control failure affected more people. Complicating the conventional wisdom that oral contraception made sex risk-free for all, the Pill was also not easy for many women to get. Restrictive laws in some states barred it for unmarried women and for women under the age of twenty-one. The Roe decision, in 1973, afforded thousands upon thousands of teen-agers a chance to avoid early marriage and motherhood. Myers writes, “Policies governing access to the pill had little if any effect on the average probabilities of marrying and giving birth at a young age. In contrast, policy environments in which abortion was legal and readily accessible by young women are estimated to have caused a 34 percent reduction in first births, a 19 percent reduction in first marriages, and a 63 percent reduction in ‘shotgun marriages’ prior to age 19.”

Access to legal abortion, whether as a backup to birth control or not, meant that women, like men, could have a sexual life without risking their future. A woman could plan her life without having to consider that it could be derailed by a single sperm. She could dream bigger dreams. Under the old rules, inculcated from girlhood, if a woman got pregnant at a young age, she married her boyfriend; and, expecting early marriage and kids, she wouldn’t have invested too heavily in her education in any case, and she would have chosen work that she could drop in and out of as family demands required.

In 1970, the average age of first-time American mothers was younger than twenty-two. Today, more women postpone marriage until they are ready for it. (Early marriages are notoriously unstable, so, if you’re glad that the divorce rate is down, you can, in part, thank Roe.) Women can also postpone childbearing until they are prepared for it, which takes some serious doing in a country that lacks paid parental leave and affordable childcare, and where discrimination against pregnant women and mothers is still widespread. For all the hand-wringing about lower birth rates, most women— eighty-six per cent of them —still become mothers. They just do it later, and have fewer children.

Most women don’t enter fields that require years of graduate-school education, but all women have benefitted from having larger numbers of women in those fields. It was female lawyers, for example, who brought cases that opened up good blue-collar jobs to women. Without more women obtaining law degrees, would men still be shaping all our legislation? Without the large numbers of women who have entered the medical professions, would psychiatrists still be telling women that they suffered from penis envy and were masochistic by nature? Would women still routinely undergo unnecessary hysterectomies? Without increased numbers of women in academia, and without the new field of women’s studies, would children still be taught, as I was, that, a hundred years ago this month, Woodrow Wilson “gave” women the vote? There has been a revolution in every field, and the women in those fields have led it.

It is frequently pointed out that the states passing abortion restrictions and bans are states where women’s status remains particularly low. Take Alabama. According to one study , by almost every index—pay, workforce participation, percentage of single mothers living in poverty, mortality due to conditions such as heart disease and stroke—the state scores among the worst for women. Children don’t fare much better: according to U.S. News rankings , Alabama is the worst state for education. It also has one of the nation’s highest rates of infant mortality (only half the counties have even one ob-gyn), and it has refused to expand Medicaid, either through the Affordable Care Act or on its own. Only four women sit in Alabama’s thirty-five-member State Senate, and none of them voted for the ban. Maybe that’s why an amendment to the bill proposed by State Senator Linda Coleman-Madison was voted down. It would have provided prenatal care and medical care for a woman and child in cases where the new law prevents the woman from obtaining an abortion. Interestingly, the law allows in-vitro fertilization, a procedure that often results in the discarding of fertilized eggs. As Clyde Chambliss, the bill’s chief sponsor in the state senate, put it, “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.” In other words, life only begins at conception if there’s a woman’s body to control.

Indifference to women and children isn’t an oversight. This is why calls for better sex education and wider access to birth control are non-starters, even though they have helped lower the rate of unwanted pregnancies, which is the cause of abortion. The point isn’t to prevent unwanted pregnancy. (States with strong anti-abortion laws have some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the country; Alabama is among them.) The point is to roll back modernity for women.

So, if women who have never had an abortion, and don’t expect to, think that the new restrictions and bans won’t affect them, they are wrong. The new laws will fall most heavily on poor women, disproportionately on women of color, who have the highest abortion rates and will be hard-pressed to travel to distant clinics.

But without legal, accessible abortion, the assumptions that have shaped all women’s lives in the past few decades—including that they, not a torn condom or a missed pill or a rapist, will decide what happens to their bodies and their futures—will change. Women and their daughters will have a harder time, and there will be plenty of people who will say that they were foolish to think that it could be otherwise.

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By Jia Tolentino

By Isaac Chotiner

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Regions & Countries

Key facts about the abortion debate in america.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade – the decision that had guaranteed a constitutional right to an abortion for nearly 50 years – has shifted the legal battle over abortion to the states, with some prohibiting the procedure and others moving to safeguard it.

As the nation’s post-Roe chapter begins, here are key facts about Americans’ views on abortion, based on two Pew Research Center polls: one conducted from June 25-July 4 , just after this year’s high court ruling, and one conducted in March , before an earlier leaked draft of the opinion became public.

This analysis primarily draws from two Pew Research Center surveys, one surveying 10,441 U.S. adults conducted March 7-13, 2022, and another surveying 6,174 U.S. adults conducted June 27-July 4, 2022. Here are the questions used for the March survey , along with responses, and the questions used for the survey from June and July , along with responses.

Everyone who took part in these surveys is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories.  Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

A majority of the U.S. public disapproves of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. About six-in-ten adults (57%) disapprove of the court’s decision that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a right to abortion and that abortion laws can be set by states, including 43% who strongly disapprove, according to the summer survey. About four-in-ten (41%) approve, including 25% who strongly approve.

About eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (82%) disapprove of the court’s decision, including nearly two-thirds (66%) who strongly disapprove. Most Republicans and GOP leaners (70%) approve , including 48% who strongly approve.

Most women (62%) disapprove of the decision to end the federal right to an abortion. More than twice as many women strongly disapprove of the court’s decision (47%) as strongly approve of it (21%). Opinion among men is more divided: 52% disapprove (37% strongly), while 47% approve (28% strongly).

About six-in-ten Americans (62%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the summer survey – little changed since the March survey conducted just before the ruling. That includes 29% of Americans who say it should be legal in all cases and 33% who say it should be legal in most cases. About a third of U.S. adults (36%) say abortion should be illegal in all (8%) or most (28%) cases.

Generally, Americans’ views of whether abortion should be legal remained relatively unchanged in the past few years , though support fluctuated somewhat in previous decades.

Relatively few Americans take an absolutist view on the legality of abortion – either supporting or opposing it at all times, regardless of circumstances. The March survey found that support or opposition to abortion varies substantially depending on such circumstances as when an abortion takes place during a pregnancy, whether the pregnancy is life-threatening or whether a baby would have severe health problems.

While Republicans’ and Democrats’ views on the legality of abortion have long differed, the 46 percentage point partisan gap today is considerably larger than it was in the recent past, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling. The wider gap has been largely driven by Democrats: Today, 84% of Democrats say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 72% in 2016 and 63% in 2007. Republicans’ views have shown far less change over time: Currently, 38% of Republicans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, nearly identical to the 39% who said this in 2007.

However, the partisan divisions over whether abortion should generally be legal tell only part of the story. According to the March survey, sizable shares of Democrats favor restrictions on abortion under certain circumstances, while majorities of Republicans favor abortion being legal in some situations , such as in cases of rape or when the pregnancy is life-threatening.

There are wide religious divides in views of whether abortion should be legal , the summer survey found. An overwhelming share of religiously unaffiliated adults (83%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do six-in-ten Catholics. Protestants are divided in their views: 48% say it should be legal in all or most cases, while 50% say it should be illegal in all or most cases. Majorities of Black Protestants (71%) and White non-evangelical Protestants (61%) take the position that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while about three-quarters of White evangelicals (73%) say it should be illegal in all (20%) or most cases (53%).

In the March survey, 72% of White evangelicals said that the statement “human life begins at conception, so a fetus is a person with rights” reflected their views extremely or very well . That’s much greater than the share of White non-evangelical Protestants (32%), Black Protestants (38%) and Catholics (44%) who said the same. Overall, 38% of Americans said that statement matched their views extremely or very well.

Catholics, meanwhile, are divided along religious and political lines in their attitudes about abortion, according to the same survey. Catholics who attend Mass regularly are among the country’s strongest opponents of abortion being legal, and they are also more likely than those who attend less frequently to believe that life begins at conception and that a fetus has rights. Catholic Republicans, meanwhile, are far more conservative on a range of abortion questions than are Catholic Democrats.

Women (66%) are more likely than men (57%) to say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling.

More than half of U.S. adults – including 60% of women and 51% of men – said in March that women should have a greater say than men in setting abortion policy . Just 3% of U.S. adults said men should have more influence over abortion policy than women, with the remainder (39%) saying women and men should have equal say.

The March survey also found that by some measures, women report being closer to the abortion issue than men . For example, women were more likely than men to say they had given “a lot” of thought to issues around abortion prior to taking the survey (40% vs. 30%). They were also considerably more likely than men to say they personally knew someone (such as a close friend, family member or themselves) who had had an abortion (66% vs. 51%) – a gender gap that was evident across age groups, political parties and religious groups.

Relatively few Americans view the morality of abortion in stark terms , the March survey found. Overall, just 7% of all U.S. adults say having an abortion is morally acceptable in all cases, and 13% say it is morally wrong in all cases. A third say that having an abortion is morally wrong in most cases, while about a quarter (24%) say it is morally acceptable in most cases. An additional 21% do not consider having an abortion a moral issue.

Among Republicans, most (68%) say that having an abortion is morally wrong either in most (48%) or all cases (20%). Only about three-in-ten Democrats (29%) hold a similar view. Instead, about four-in-ten Democrats say having an abortion is morally  acceptable  in most (32%) or all (11%) cases, while an additional 28% say it is not a moral issue. 

White evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly say having an abortion is morally wrong in most (51%) or all cases (30%). A slim majority of Catholics (53%) also view having an abortion as morally wrong, but many also say it is morally acceptable in most (24%) or all cases (4%), or that it is not a moral issue (17%). Among religiously unaffiliated Americans, about three-quarters see having an abortion as morally acceptable (45%) or not a moral issue (32%).

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Public Opinion on Abortion

Majority in u.s. say abortion should be legal in some cases, illegal in others, three-in-ten or more democrats and republicans don’t agree with their party on abortion, partisanship a bigger factor than geography in views of abortion access locally, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

There Are More Than Two Sides to the Abortion Debate

Readers share their perspectives.

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Earlier this week I curated some nuanced commentary on abortion and solicited your thoughts on the same subject. What follows includes perspectives from several different sides of the debate. I hope each one informs your thinking, even if only about how some other people think.

We begin with a personal reflection.

Cheryl was 16 when New York State passed a statute legalizing abortion and 19 when Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. At the time she was opposed to the change, because “it just felt wrong.” Less than a year later, her mother got pregnant and announced she was getting an abortion.

She recalled:

My parents were still married to each other, and we were financially stable. Nonetheless, my mother’s announcement immediately made me a supporter of the legal right to abortion. My mother never loved me. My father was physically abusive and both parents were emotionally and psychologically abusive on a virtually daily basis. My home life was hellish. When my mother told me about the intended abortion, my first thought was, “Thank God that they won’t be given another life to destroy.” I don’t deny that there are reasons to oppose abortion. As a feminist and a lawyer, I can now articulate several reasons for my support of legal abortion: a woman’s right to privacy and autonomy and to the equal protection of the laws are near the top of the list. (I agree with Ruth Bader Ginsburg that equal protection is a better legal rationale for the right to abortion than privacy.) But my emotional reaction from 1971 still resonates with me. Most people who comment on the issue, on both sides, do not understand what it is to go through childhood unloved. It is horrific beyond my powers of description. To me, there is nothing more immoral than forcing that kind of life on any child. Anti-abortion activists often like to ask supporters of abortion rights: “Well, what if your mother had decided to abort you?” All I can say is that I have spent a great portion of my life wishing that my mother had done exactly that.

Steven had related thoughts:

I have respect for the idea that there should be some restrictions on abortion. But the most fundamental, and I believe flawed, unstated assumptions of the anti-choice are that A) they are acting on behalf of the fetus, and more importantly B) they know what the fetus would want. I would rather not have been born than to have been born to a mother who did not want me. All children should be wanted children—for the sake of all concerned. You can say that different fetuses would “want” different things—though it’s hard to say a clump of cells “wants” anything. How would we know? The argument lands, as it does generally, with the question of who should be making that decision. Who best speaks in the fetus’s interests? Who is better positioned morally or practically than the expectant mother?

Geoff self-describes as “pro-life” and guilty of some hypocrisy. He writes:

I’m pro-life because I have a hard time with the dehumanization that comes with the extremes of abortion on demand … Should it be okay to get an abortion when you find your child has Down syndrome? What of another abnormality? Or just that you didn’t want a girl? Any argument that these are legitimate reasons is disturbing. But so many of the pro-life just don’t seem to care about life unless it’s a fetus they can force a woman to carry. The hypocrisy is real. While you can argue that someone on death row made a choice that got them to that point, whereas a fetus had no say, I find it still hard to swallow that you can claim one life must be protected and the other must be taken. Life should be life. At least in the Catholic Church this is more consistent. I myself am guilty of a degree of hypocrisy. My wife and I used IVF to have our twins. There were other embryos created and not inserted. They were eventually destroyed. So did I support killing a life? Maybe? I didn’t want to donate them for someone else to give birth to—it felt wrong to think my twins may have brothers or sisters in the world they would never know about. Yet does that mean I was more willing to kill my embryos than to have them adopted? Sure seems like it. So I made a morality deal with myself and moved the goal post—the embryos were not yet in a womb and were so early in development that they couldn’t be considered fully human life. They were still potential life.

Colleen, a mother of three, describes why she ended her fourth pregnancy:

I was young when I first engaged this debate. Raised Catholic, anti-choice, and so committed to my position that I broke my parents’ hearts by giving birth during my junior year of college. At that time, my sense of my own rights in the matter was almost irrelevant. I was enslaved by my body. One husband and two babies later I heard a remarkable Jesuit theologian (I wish I could remember his name) speak on the matter and he, a Catholic priest, framed it most directly. We prioritize one life over another all the time. Most obviously, we justify the taking of life in war with all kinds of arguments that often turn out to be untrue. We also do so as we decide who merits access to health care or income support or other life-sustaining things. So the question of abortion then boils down to: Who gets to decide? Who gets to decide that the life of a human in gestation is actually more valuable than the life of the woman who serves as host—or vice versa? Who gets to decide when the load a woman is being asked to carry is more than she can bear? The state? Looking back over history, he argued that he certainly had more faith in the person most involved to make the best decision than in any formalized structure—church or state—created by men. Every form of birth control available failed me at one point or another, so when yet a 4th pregnancy threatened to interrupt the education I had finally been able to resume, I said “Enough.” And as I cried and struggled to come to that position, the question that haunted me was “Doesn’t MY life count?” And I decided it did.

Florence articulates what it would take to make her anti-abortion:

What people seem to miss is that depriving a woman of bodily autonomy is slavery. A person who does not control his/her own body is—what? A slave. At its simplest, this is the issue. I will be anti-abortion when men and women are equal in all facets of life—wages, chores, child-rearing responsibilities, registering for the draft, to name a few obvious ones. When there is birth control that is effective, where women do not bear most of the responsibility. We need to raise boys who are respectful to girls, who do not think that they are entitled to coerce a girl into having sex that she doesn’t really want or is unprepared for. We need for sex education to be provided in schools so young couples know what they are getting into when they have sex. Especially the repercussions of pregnancy. We need to raise girls who are confident and secure, who don’t believe they need a male to “complete” them. Who have enough agency to say “no” and to know why. We have to make abortion unnecessary … We have so far to go. If abortion is ruled illegal, or otherwise curtailed, we will never know if the solutions to women’s second-class status will work. We will be set back to the 50s or worse. I don’t want to go back. Women have fought from the beginning of time to own their bodies and their lives. To deprive us of all of the amazing strides forward will affect all future generations.

Similarly, Ben agrees that in our current environment, abortion is often the only way women can retain equal citizenship and participation in society, but also agrees with pro-lifers who critique the status quo, writing that he doesn’t want a world where a daughter’s equality depends on her right “to perform an act of violence on their potential descendents.” Here’s how he resolves his conflictedness:

Conservatives arguing for a more family-centered society, in which abortion is unnecessary to protect the equal rights of women, are like liberals who argue for defunding the police and relying on addiction, counselling, and other services, in that they argue for removing what offends them without clear, credible plans to replace the functions it serves. I sincerely hope we can move towards a world in which armed police are less necessary. But before we can remove the guardrails of the police, we need to make the rest of the changes so that the world works without them. Once liberal cities that have shown interest in defunding the police can prove that they can fund alternatives, and that those alternatives work, then I will throw my support behind defunding the police. Similarly, once conservative politicians demonstrate a credible commitment to an alternative vision of society in which women are supported, families are not taken for granted, and careers and short-term productivity are not the golden calves they are today, I will be willing to support further restrictions on abortion. But until I trust that they are interested in solving the underlying problem (not merely eliminating an aspect they find offensive), I will defend abortion, as terrible as it is, within reasonable legal limits.

Two readers objected to foregrounding gender equality. One emailed anonymously, writing in part:

A fetus either is or isn’t a person. The reason I’m pro-life is that I’ve never heard a coherent defense of the proposition that a fetus is not a person, and I’m not sure one can be made. I’ve read plenty of progressive commentary, and when it bothers to make an argument for abortion “rights” at all, it talks about “the importance of women’s healthcare” or something as if that were the issue.

Christopher expanded on that last argument:

Of the many competing ethical concerns, the one that trumps them all is the status of the fetus. It is the only organism that gets destroyed by the procedure. Whether that is permissible trumps all other concerns. Otherwise important ethical claims related to a woman’s bodily autonomy, less relevant social disparities caused by the differences in men’s and women’s reproductive functions, and even less relevant differences in partisan commitments to welfare that would make abortion less appealing––all of that is secondary. The relentless strategy by the pro-choice to sidestep this question and pretend that a woman’s right to bodily autonomy is the primary ethical concern is, to me, somewhere between shibboleth and mass delusion. We should spend more time, even if it’s unproductive, arguing about the status of the fetus, because that is the question, and we should spend less time indulging this assault-on-women’s-rights narrative pushed by the Left.

Jean is critical of the pro-life movement:

Long-acting reversible contraceptives, robust, science-based sex education for teens, and a stronger social safety net would all go a remarkable way toward decreasing the number of abortions sought. Yet all the emphasis seems to be on simply making abortion illegal. For many, overturning Roe v. Wade is not about reducing abortions so much as signalling that abortion is wrong. If so-called pro-lifers were as concerned about abortion as they seem to be, they would spend more time, effort, and money supporting efforts to reduce the need for abortion—not simply trying to make it illegal without addressing why women seek it out. Imagine, in other words, a world where women hardly needed to rely on abortion for their well-being and ability to thrive. Imagine a world where almost any woman who got pregnant had planned to do so, or was capable of caring for that child. What is the anti-abortion movement doing to promote that world?

Destiny has one relevant answer. She writes:

I run a pro-life feminist group and we often say that our goal is not to make abortion illegal, but rather unnecessary and unthinkable by supporting women and humanizing the unborn child so well.

Robert suggests a different focus:

Any well-reasoned discussion of abortion policy must include contraception because abortion is about unwanted children brought on by poorly reasoned choices about sex. Such choices will always be more emotional than rational. Leaving out contraception makes it an unrealistic, airy discussion of moral philosophy. In particular, we need to consider government-funded programs of long-acting reversible contraception which enable reasoned choices outside the emotional circumstances of having sexual intercourse.

Last but not least, if anyone can unite the pro-life and pro-choice movements, it’s Errol, whose thoughts would rankle majorities in both factions as well as a majority of Americans. He writes:

The decision to keep the child should not be left up solely to the woman. Yes, it is her body that the child grows in, however once that child is birthed it is now two people’s responsibility. That’s entirely unfair to the father when he desired the abortion but the mother couldn’t find it in her heart to do it. If a woman wants to abort and the man wants to keep it, she should abort. However I feel the same way if a man wants to abort. The next 18+ years of your life are on the line. I view that as a trade-off that warrants the male’s input. Abortion is a conversation that needs to be had by two people, because those two will be directly tied to the result for a majority of their life. No one else should be involved with that decision, but it should not be solely hers, either.

Thanks to all who contributed answers to this week’s question, whether or not they were among the ones published. What subjects would you like to see fellow readers address in future installments? Email [email protected].

By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in this newsletter and on our website. Published feedback includes a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note.

Ethics and Morality

Ethics and abortion, two opposing arguments on the morality of abortion..

Posted June 7, 2019 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

Abortion is, once again, center stage in our political debates. According to the Guttmacher Institute, over 350 pieces of legislation restricting abortion have been introduced. Ten states have signed bans of some sort, but these are all being challenged. None of these, including "heartbeat" laws, are currently in effect. 1

Much has been written about abortion from a philosophical perspective. Here, I'd like to summarize what I believe to be the best argument on each side of the abortion debate. To be clear, I'm not advocating either position here; I'm simply trying to bring some clarity to the issues. The focus of these arguments is on the morality of abortion, not its constitutional or legal status. This is important. One might believe, as many do, that at least some abortions are immoral but that the law should not restrict choice in this realm of life. Others, of course, argue that abortion is immoral and should be illegal in most or all cases.

"Personhood"

Personhood refers to the moral status of an entity. If an entity is a person , in this particular sense, it has full moral status . A person, then, has rights , and we have obligations to that person. This includes the right to life. Both of the arguments I summarize here focus on the question of whether or not the fetus is a person, or whether or not it is the type of entity that has the right to life. This is an important aspect to focus on, because what a thing is determines how we should treat it, morally speaking. For example, if I break a leg off of a table, I haven't done anything wrong. But if I break a puppy's leg, I surely have done something wrong. I have obligations to the puppy, given what kind of creature it is, that I don't have to a table, or any other inanimate object. The issue, then, is what kind of thing a fetus is, and what that entails for how we ought to treat it.

A Pro-Choice Argument

I believe that the best type of pro-choice argument focuses on the personhood of the fetus. Mary Ann Warren has argued that fetuses are not persons; they do not have the right to life. 2 Therefore, abortion is morally permissible throughout the entire pregnancy . To see why, Warren argues that persons have the following traits:

• Consciousness: awareness of oneself, the external world, the ability to feel pain.
• Reasoning: a developed ability to solve fairly complex problems.
• Ability to communicate: on a variety of topics, with some depth.
• Self-motivated activity: ability to choose what to do (or not to do) in a way that is not determined by genetics or the environment .
• Self-concept : see themselves as _____; e.g. Kenyan, female, athlete , Muslim, Christian, atheist, etc.

The key point for Warren is that fetuses do not have any of these traits. Therefore, they are not persons. They do not have a right to life, and abortion is morally permissible. You and I do have these traits, therefore we are persons. We do have rights, including the right to life.

One problem with this argument is that we now know that fetuses are conscious at roughly the midpoint of a pregnancy, given the development timeline of fetal brain activity. Given this, some have modified Warren's argument so that it only applies to the first half of a pregnancy. This still covers the vast majority of abortions that occur in the United States, however.

A Pro-Life Argument

The following pro-life argument shares the same approach, focusing on the personhood of the fetus. However, this argument contends that fetuses are persons because in an important sense they possess all of the traits Warren lists. 3

At first glance, this sounds ridiculous. At 12 weeks, for example, fetuses are not able to engage in reasoning, they don't have a self-concept, nor are they conscious. In fact, they don't possess any of these traits.

Or do they?

In one sense, they do. To see how, consider an important distinction, the distinction between latent capacities vs. actualized capacities. Right now, I have the actualized capacity to communicate in English about the ethics of abortion. I'm demonstrating that capacity right now. I do not, however, have the actualized capacity to communicate in Spanish on this issue. I do, however, have the latent capacity to do so. If I studied Spanish, practiced it with others, or even lived in a Spanish-speaking nation for a while, I would likely be able to do so. The latent capacity I have now to communicate in Spanish would become actualized.

Here is the key point for this argument: Given the type of entities that human fetuses are, they have all of the traits of persons laid out by Mary Anne Warren. They do not possess these traits in their actualized form. But they have them in their latent form, because of their human nature. Proponents of this argument claim that possessing the traits of personhood, in their latent form, is sufficient for being a person, for having full moral status, including the right to life. They say that fetuses are not potential persons, but persons with potential. In contrast to this, Warren and others maintain that the capacities must be actualized before one is person.

The Abortion Debate

There is much confusion in the abortion debate. The existence of a heartbeat is not enough, on its own, to confer a right to life. On this, I believe many pro-lifers are mistaken. But on the pro-choice side, is it ethical to abort fetuses as a way to select the gender of one's child, for instance?

We should not focus solely on the fetus, of course, but also on the interests of the mother, father, and society as a whole. Many believe that in order to achieve this goal, we need to provide much greater support to women who may want to give birth and raise their children, but choose not to for financial, psychological, health, or relationship reasons; that adoption should be much less expensive, so that it is a live option for more qualified parents; and that quality health care should be accessible to all.

I fear , however, that one thing that gets lost in all of the dialogue, debate, and rhetoric surrounding the abortion issue is the nature of the human fetus. This is certainly not the only issue. But it is crucial to determining the morality of abortion, one way or the other. People on both sides of the debate would do well to build their views with this in mind.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/state-abortion-bans-2019-signed-effect/story?id=63172532

Mary Ann Warren, "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion," originally in Monist 57:1 (1973), pp. 43-61. Widely anthologized.

This is a synthesis of several pro-life arguments. For more, see the work of Robert George and Francis Beckwith on these issues.

Michael W. Austin, Ph.D. , is a professor of philosophy at Eastern Kentucky University.

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Essay on Abortion as a Social Problem

Introduction

With regards to sociology, social problem can be deemed to be an issue or condition that has negative effects and impacts that are recognizable amongst large population within the society. According to Loseke (2017), “a social problem exists when a group of people, believing that its interests are not being met, or that it is not receiving a sufficient share of resources, works to overcome what it perceives as a disadvantage”. For the purpose of this discussion, the selected social problem that was selected was the issue of abortion. Indeed, abortion has been a social issue that has raised quite a huge amount of controversy as well as debates in various countries and societies around the world.

The bone of contention with regards to abortion and all the controversies lies on the issue of social norms and values. Most of the individuals within any given society attack abortion on the notion of the normative value structures which are mostly based on religious principles as well as ideologies. Abortion in the sociological contexts happens to lie between the perspectives of the society as well as values within the society (Dildon, 2007). Mostly, them that practice abortion too tend to fight with the guilt as well as how the society might react to them after the abortion. Despite abortion being a social problem, it appears to be stemming from a personal problem too. Arguments and discussions within societies as well as legislative structure in various governments have always tried to determine whether to legalize abortion or whether not to do so. Among the many reasons why I picked this particular issue was to learn how abortion has affected and gripped our modern society as well as gain knowledge of how to make the world a better place through assessing the reasons for abortion and what can be done about it. According Ahrens et al., (2017), around 893,000 abortions took place in the US in 2016, thus indicating a drop from 914,000 in 2015. In other parts of the world such as Africa, statics cannot be so accurate since abortions go unreported. By the fact that abortion is a taboo, most women practice unsafe abortion for the fear of being noticed by the society. This results into death as well as other complications. A certain African country recorded that 2500 women die due to unsafe abortion.

Causes of the problem

Abortion being the termination of pregnancy before the full development of a fetus, there has always been two prevalent views regarding this issue. First of all, there is the pro-choice view which generally argues that the mothers ought to have the ability to choose whether to have the baby or not. On the other hand, there is the pro-life perspective which views that a fetus has the right to live from the moment of inception. This are the two major variations that the society tend to view the issue of abortion. On a historical account before abortion was legalized in America, in 1970, a single woman by the name Jane Roe filed a petition that she law abridged her right to personal privacy (Strickland, 2014). She wished for the termination of her pregnancy but the court could not allow it citing that the law only allowed abortion when one’s life is in danger. However, with several court hearings, the court agreed that Jane Roe was right, every woman has the right to privacy and can also have an abortion on if conducted by a qualified physician. Nevertheless, ever since Jane Roe’s court case, heated battle lines have been in existence between the pro-choice advocates who vigilantly support the right to abortion and the pro-choice supports who would do all that it takes to stop abortion. Both parties’ beliefs, pro-choice and pro-abortion, differ ethically, lawfully and morally.

With reference to the pro-choice supporters, they strongly argue that the woman should fully have control of the pregnancy and decide whether to have the baby or not since it is her body, health as well as her future. Another perspective that the pro-choice supporters have is that those who are desperate and intend to abort still do so despite the legal or moral perspectives. If they happen to be limited by the legal structures or the societal values, they end up practicing illegal, unsafe abortion without the appropriate medical assistance or supervision which results into death, both for the mother to be and the fetus hence it is an entire loss. On another account, most people believe that the pro-choice supporters are pro-abortion supporters. This is not entirely true since there exists some pro-choice supporters who view forced abortion to be unethical and illegal just as outlawing abortion (Strickland, 2014). Pro-life advocates cannot stand a chance to view abortion as anything less than murder. They claim that life starts immediately after conception and therefore, terminating a pregnancy means terminating a life. By claiming that a woman ought to have full control of their bodies which include pregnancy is quite absurd to the pro-life advocates. The fetus’ life is not a part of the woman’s body thus claiming that their argument is illogical and does not have any foundation (Strickland, 2014).

Most of the pro-choice supporters, on ethical basis, deem abortion to be a last resort and there exists several scenarios whereby, abortion can be understandable as well as necessary to have but the pro-life tend to differ on some cases. The only case that seems acceptable to pro-life advocates is only when the mother’s life is at stake. Some of the situations include a rape victim who conceived as a result of the dreadful act. Carrying the pregnancy can be viewed to be traumatizing as well as progressive remembrance of what happened to her (Dillon, 2007). For such a matter, the pro-choice view it as an allowable option. On the other hand, pro-life’s view would be to have the baby since the baby’s life cannot be determined by the actions but rather how he/she will be raised. Pro-life advocates advise rape victims to undergo therapy sessions.

The other scenario is when both the mother and the fetus or either the mother or the fetus life is at stake. Due to health issues, there can be situations whereby the mother’s life can be threatened by her pregnancy. Given such a scenario, the only option is that one life has to be sacrificed for the sake of the other. This is a situation that has raised a lot of controversies over the years since debates have been conducted in trying to decide whose life is of paramount importance. With her health at risk, the pro-choice advocates believe that the mother ought to be given the choice to determine whether to have an abortion or not.

The other issue that mostly leads to abortion is of when a woman feels that she does not have the ability to raise a child. With the current rise on economic standards, most women find it to be tough to raise a child as a single mother. They opt to have an abortion hence shutting down the potential responsibilities of raising a child. However, such a scenario has been faced with a lot of critics. Most of the pro-choice supporters regard it to be okay stating that it is a personal preference that has its basis on the present and future perception. On the other hand pro-choice supporters claim that present or future perceptions can never be the reason for terminating a life. They claim that such an argument would only be equated to killing each other on the basis of present and future perceptions of economic crisis (Strickland, 2014).

The teenage as well as single parents are the most affected with such a situation. Teenage pregnancy is a common yet serious issue in America. Research indicates that teenage pregnancies are a leading factor towards abortion. With statistics from National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, it stated that in every ten teen pregnancies, eight happen to be unintended whereby 81% of the victims happened not to be married. Besides that, a third of the unintended pregnancies do end up aborted. Some of the teens hardly do have the ability to raise a child. Others cannot even feed themselves, leave alone feeding an extra mouth (Dillon, 2007). Besides that, some others are just terrified of the outcomes and what life would be to them. With all these issue, they end up seeking consolation in abortion. The pro-choice supporters do support it based on the fact that the say that it is the mother’s choice whether to carry on with the pregnancy or not. They argue that teen pregnancies have a negative impact to the teens and the children too who are born out of it. The teens happen to be limited in exploring some of their abilities such as advancing their education in order to take care of the child and so on. Sometimes these teen cannot properly support the child and at the end raise them in quite unfavorable conditions. However, the pro-life tend to view abortion on the basis of teenage pregnancy as quite absurd stating that one ought to take preventive measures as well as one should be able to take responsibilities of his/her actions. Both the mother and the father of the child should take initiative to support the child.

Measures to solve the problem

The very first and amiable solution to abortion is getting rid of unwanted pregnancies. The pro-life may think that the best way to properly deal with abortion is to illegalize it but that would not do any good as some may seek refuge in illegal abortions hence end up in life loss (Spector, 2017). The best way to reduce unwanted pregnancies is to educate masses about abstinence as well as the use of contraceptives. This masses include teenagers as well as adults. Nearly half of the wanted pregnancies end up in abortion. Helping the masses be aware of how to be cautious of unwanted pregnancies will help a lot. The other bit is that the government can intensively support the insurance coverage of the public funding with regards to family planning. In addition to that, a greater access to emergency contraception can be ensured since it prevents conception and does not lead to abortion. Programs that curb sexual abuse such as rape ought to be put in place. This offloads women the burden of whether to have an abortion or not of a pregnancy that was a result of rape. Moreover, the government has also taken some measure in curbing this issue. Due to the fear of raising a child based on the present and future perceptions, the government has setup ways in which birthmothers can meet adoptive parents (Horwitz, 2017).

Abortion is indeed an issue affecting the society. Despite it being a debate that rises from the ethical and moral perspective, with it comes some cons. Death of birthmothers as they try to seek out an abortion affects the immediate family as well as the entire society as well. With existence of the pro-choice and the pro-life advocates, it is evident that abortion has its shortcomings and in addition, it is an issue that requires to be addressed as well as solutions be implemented. Moreover, having an abortion is not the solution as the expected baby may become someone great in future.

Ahrens, K. A., Thoma, M. E., Copen, C. E., Frederiksen, B. N., Decker, E. J., & Moskosky, S. (2018). Unintended pregnancy and interpregnancy interval by maternal age, National Survey of Family Growth. Contraception.

Dillon, M. (2007). Abortion as a social problem.  The Blackwell encyclopedia of sociology .

Horwitz, R. (2017). The Jane Collective (1969–1973). Embryo Project Encyclopedia.

Loseke, D. (2017).  Thinking about social problems: An introduction to constructionist perspectives . Routledge.

Spector, M., & Kitsuse, J. I. (2017).  Constructing social problems . Routledge.

Strickland, R. A. (2014). Abortion: Pro-Choice versus Pro-Life. In  Moral Controversies in American Politics  (pp. 45-86). Routledge.

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Abortion — Argumentative Essay Outline On Abortion

Argumentative Essay Outline on Abortion

• Categories: Abortion

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Words: 665 |

Published: Mar 13, 2024

Words: 665 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, thesis statement, paragraph 1: the right to bodily autonomy, paragraph 2: the health and safety of women, paragraph 3: reproductive freedom and economic justice.

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Arguments against Abortion

This essay about the arguments against abortion explores the complex moral, ethical, and societal considerations surrounding the issue. It examines perspectives rooted in the sanctity of human life, bodily autonomy, and the potential harm to women’s physical and psychological well-being. Additionally, it discusses how the normalization of abortion may contribute to a culture of death and perpetuate discrimination through selective practices. Ultimately, the essay emphasizes the need for thoughtful engagement with these diverse viewpoints and a commitment to upholding the dignity and rights of all individuals involved.

How it works

Abortion is an issue that continues to spark intense debate and controversy across societies worldwide. It is a topic entrenched in moral, ethical, and legal complexities, with advocates and opponents presenting divergent viewpoints shaped by various philosophical, religious, and cultural perspectives. While proponents of abortion rights champion the importance of reproductive autonomy and women’s rights, opponents of abortion articulate compelling arguments grounded in notions of morality, the sanctity of life, and societal well-being. In this essay, I will delve into several distinct arguments against abortion, offering a nuanced exploration of their underlying principles and implications.

One of the foremost arguments against abortion stems from the belief in the inherent value and sanctity of human life. Many individuals, often guided by religious or philosophical convictions, assert that life begins at conception and that every embryo possesses intrinsic worth deserving of protection. From this perspective, abortion is viewed as an act of unjustifiable violence against an innocent human being, denying them the opportunity to fulfill their potential and contribute to society. Proponents of this argument advocate for the recognition of the unborn as moral subjects entitled to the same rights and protections afforded to born individuals.

Furthermore, opponents of abortion raise concerns about the ethical implications of terminating a pregnancy on the grounds of bodily autonomy alone. While women undoubtedly have the right to make decisions about their bodies, critics argue that this right must be balanced against the rights of the unborn child. They contend that abortion represents a violation of the unborn’s fundamental right to life, emphasizing the ethical responsibility that comes with engaging in activities that may result in pregnancy. Rather than resorting to abortion as a solution to unplanned or unwanted pregnancies, opponents advocate for alternatives such as adoption, which prioritize the preservation of life while respecting women’s autonomy.

Another compelling argument against abortion centers on the potential physical and psychological harm it can inflict upon women. Critics point to a range of adverse outcomes associated with abortion, including medical complications, emotional distress, and long-term psychological trauma. While advocates for abortion rights often emphasize the importance of safe and legal access to abortion, opponents caution against overlooking the risks and consequences that women may face. They argue that a more holistic approach to reproductive healthcare should prioritize the well-being of both women and unborn children, promoting alternatives that address the underlying reasons for seeking abortion while mitigating potential harms.

Moreover, opponents of abortion contend that its widespread acceptance contributes to a culture of death and devalues the sanctity of human life. They argue that the normalization of abortion erodes societal attitudes towards the inherent value and dignity of every individual, fostering a climate in which the taking of human life is increasingly viewed as permissible. From this perspective, abortion not only threatens the lives of the unborn but also undermines the moral fabric of society, perpetuating a culture of indifference towards human suffering and injustice.

Critics of abortion also raise concerns about the discriminatory practices that can arise from selective abortions based on factors such as gender, disability, or socioeconomic status. They argue that the widespread availability of abortion perpetuates harmful stereotypes and inequalities, reinforcing existing prejudices against vulnerable populations. Additionally, they contend that selective abortion perpetuates a eugenic mindset, wherein certain lives are deemed less valuable or worthy of protection based on arbitrary criteria, further exacerbating social injustices and inequities.

In conclusion, the arguments against abortion encompass a spectrum of ethical, religious, and social considerations, reflecting the complex nature of this contentious issue. From the assertion of the sanctity of life to concerns about bodily autonomy and societal implications, opponents of abortion present diverse perspectives that challenge prevailing narratives surrounding reproductive rights. Engaging with these arguments fosters a deeper understanding of the ethical dilemmas at play and underscores the need for thoughtful and compassionate approaches to addressing the complexities of abortion. Ultimately, navigating this fraught terrain requires a commitment to upholding the dignity and worth of all individuals, born and unborn, while striving to promote the well-being and autonomy of women within a framework of respect and justice.

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Persuasive Essay Guide

Persuasive Essay About Abortion

Crafting a Convincing Persuasive Essay About Abortion

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Are you about to write a persuasive essay on abortion but wondering how to begin?

Writing an effective persuasive essay on the topic of abortion can be a difficult task for many students. 

It is important to understand both sides of the issue and form an argument based on facts and logical reasoning. This requires research and understanding, which takes time and effort.

In this blog, we will provide you with some easy steps to craft a persuasive essay about abortion that is compelling and convincing. Moreover, we have included some example essays and interesting facts to read and get inspired by. 

So let's start!

• 1. How To Write a Persuasive Essay About Abortion?
• 2. Persuasive Essay About Abortion Examples
• 3. Examples of Argumentative Essay About Abortion
• 4. Abortion Persuasive Essay Topics
• 5. Facts About Abortion You Need to Know

How To Write a Persuasive Essay About Abortion?

Abortion is a controversial topic, with people having differing points of view and opinions on the matter. There are those who oppose abortion, while some people endorse pro-choice arguments. 

It is also an emotionally charged subject, so you need to be extra careful when crafting your persuasive essay .

Before you start writing your persuasive essay, you need to understand the following steps.

Step 1: Choose Your Position

The first step to writing a persuasive essay on abortion is to decide your position. Do you support the practice or are you against it? You need to make sure that you have a clear opinion before you begin writing. 

Once you have decided, research and find evidence that supports your position. This will help strengthen your argument. 

Check out the video below to get more insights into this topic:

Step 2: Choose Your Audience

The next step is to decide who your audience will be. Will you write for pro-life or pro-choice individuals? Or both? 

Knowing who you are writing for will guide your writing and help you include the most relevant facts and information.

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Step 3: Define Your Argument

Now that you have chosen your position and audience, it is time to craft your argument. 

Start by defining what you believe and why, making sure to use evidence to support your claims. You also need to consider the opposing arguments and come up with counter arguments. This helps make your essay more balanced and convincing.

Step 4: Format Your Essay

Once you have the argument ready, it is time to craft your persuasive essay. Follow a standard format for the essay, with an introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. 

Make sure that each paragraph is organized and flows smoothly. Use clear and concise language, getting straight to the point.

Step 5: Proofread and Edit

The last step in writing your persuasive essay is to make sure that you proofread and edit it carefully. Look for spelling, grammar, punctuation, or factual errors and correct them. This will help make your essay more professional and convincing.

These are the steps you need to follow when writing a persuasive essay on abortion. It is a good idea to read some examples before you start so you can know how they should be written.

Continue reading to find helpful examples.

Persuasive Essay About Abortion Examples

To help you get started, here are some example persuasive essays on abortion that may be useful for your own paper.

Short Persuasive Essay About Abortion

Persuasive Essay About No To Abortion

What Is Abortion? - Essay Example

Persuasive Speech on Abortion

Legal Abortion Persuasive Essay

Persuasive Essay About Abortion in the Philippines

Persuasive Essay about legalizing abortion

You can also read m ore persuasive essay examples to imp rove your persuasive skills.

Examples of Argumentative Essay About Abortion

An argumentative essay is a type of essay that presents both sides of an argument. These essays rely heavily on logic and evidence.

Here are some examples of argumentative essay with introduction, body and conclusion that you can use as a reference in writing your own argumentative essay. 

Abortion Persuasive Essay Introduction

Argumentative Essay About Abortion Conclusion

Argumentative Essay About Abortion Pdf

Argumentative Essay About Abortion in the Philippines

Argumentative Essay About Abortion - Introduction

Abortion Persuasive Essay Topics

If you are looking for some topics to write your persuasive essay on abortion, here are some examples:

• Should abortion be legal in the United States?
• Is it ethical to perform abortions, considering its pros and cons?
• What should be done to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies that lead to abortions?
• Is there a connection between abortion and psychological trauma?
• What are the ethical implications of abortion on demand?
• How has the debate over abortion changed over time?
• Should there be legal restrictions on late-term abortions?
• Does gender play a role in how people view abortion rights?
• Is it possible to reduce poverty and unwanted pregnancies through better sex education?
• How is the anti-abortion point of view affected by religious beliefs and values? 

These are just some of the potential topics that you can use for your persuasive essay on abortion. Think carefully about the topic you want to write about and make sure it is something that interests you. 

Check out m ore persuasive essay topics that will help you explore other things that you can write about!

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Facts About Abortion You Need to Know

Here are some facts about abortion that will help you formulate better arguments.

• According to the Guttmacher Institute , 1 in 4 pregnancies end in abortion.
• The majority of abortions are performed in the first trimester.
• Abortion is one of the safest medical procedures, with less than a 0.5% risk of major complications.
• In the United States, 14 states have laws that restrict or ban most forms of abortion after 20 weeks gestation.
• Seven out of 198 nations allow elective abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
• In places where abortion is illegal, more women die during childbirth and due to complications resulting from pregnancy.
• A majority of pregnant women who opt for abortions do so for financial and social reasons.
• According to estimates, 56 million abortions occur annually.

In conclusion, these are some of the examples, steps, and topics that you can use to write a persuasive essay. Make sure to do your research thoroughly and back up your arguments with evidence. This will make your essay more professional and convincing. 

Need the services of a professional essay writing service ? We've got your back!

MyPerfectWords.com is a persuasive essay writing service that provides help to students in the form of professionally written essays. Our persuasive essay writer can craft quality persuasive essays on any topic, including abortion. 

Frequently Asked Questions

What should i talk about in an essay about abortion.

When writing an essay about abortion, it is important to cover all the aspects of the subject. This includes discussing both sides of the argument, providing facts and evidence to support your claims, and exploring potential solutions.

What is a good argument for abortion?

A good argument for abortion could be that it is a woman’s choice to choose whether or not to have an abortion. It is also important to consider the potential risks of carrying a pregnancy to term.

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Keep reading

Trump tries to unburden himself of abortion albatross

It's a close election. abortion is a problem. trump's solution: wash his hands of the issue.

Social Sharing

Abortion may be the biggest threat to Donald Trump's political comeback. Like an albatross he personally helped set loose. Now he's trying to wriggle from its clutches.

The former president has released his long-awaited statement on abortion policy and its evident objective is to defuse this as an election issue.

It consists of two parts: Leave abortion decisions to individual states, and warn those states that adopting a total ban is a political loser.

So even as he took credit for ending the constitutional right to an abortion, and as he applauded the judges he appointed for doing so in 2022, Trump asked his party to be pragmatic. 

• Trump says abortion laws should be left to states, but leaves critical questions unanswered
• Analysis Biden's comeback blueprint: State of the union reveals re-election strategy

He urged states to be lenient in cases of rape, or incest, or when an abortion might save the life of the mother, unlike the more severe bans already in effect in several states.

"You must follow your heart on this issue, But remember: You must also win elections," Trump said in a video he released Monday.

Abortion bans unpopular

The political math behind Trump's position is obvious.

Americans mostly dislike the abortion bans that have been unleashed  across the U.S. South and elsewhere in more than a dozen states since the 2022 Supreme Court decision.

Since then, Democrats have been outperforming expectations in byelections, midterm elections and referendums on the issue.

By a 26-point gap, Pew Research found last year that Americans would rather see abortion be legal in all or most cases, than see it be illegal. 

In this tight presidential race, Trump would rather have voters focused on his own favoured issues: inflation and the porous southern border.

There's no guarantee his gambit will work.

A plethora of factors will keep pushing abortion back into the news, and onto the president's desk: ongoing court cases, complex federal-state issues, referendums and personal anecdotes.

It took just one day for real-world events to illustrate that point.

In the key presidential swing state of Arizona, a court on Tuesday re-imposed a near-total ban  on abortion that dates back to 1864. Voters will likely be asked to weigh in on it in a referendum during the November election. 

It's disingenuous for Trump now to dissociate himself from the consequences of his own decision to appoint anti-abortion judges, said a lawyer who works on the issue.

Arizona court reinstates abortion ban dating from 1864

Trump's position 'utter garbage,' says advocate.

"This is the president who let the horse out of the barn. Let it run away. And now he's saying, 'Maybe next year I'll buy you a pony.' It is utter garbage," said Julie F. Kay, lawyer, author  and executive director of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine Access.

Trump, she says, is trying to make voters forget this is an election issue. 

• What the U.S. Supreme Court hearing on abortion medication is about
• Video Why Alabama's Supreme Court ruled frozen embryos are 'children' | About That

For example, the president gets to appoint the leaders of U.S. agencies that affect access to abortion medication: like the Food and Drug Administration  (which approves it and allows it to be prescribed online) and the U.S. Postal Service  (which allows it to be shipped into anti-abortion states).

The issue is a potential vote-driver. And not just in the presidential race. 

There are also myriad elections this fall at the state level — for politicians, judges, prosecutors and attorneys general; there are also referendums planned, including in presidential swing states, and in states that could decide control of Congress.

"Every election is important around abortion rights in this day and age," Kay said. "But this one in particular is very important."

Ongoing court cases

Meanwhile, there are also ongoing court cases. The Supreme Court just heard one and will hear another. 

Anti-abortion activists are trying to overturn federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, although in a recent hearing the judges sounded unlikely to agree.

The court will soon hear a case from Idaho about whether emergency-room doctors can refuse to perform abortions in an emergency.

U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments over abortion drug availability

Meanwhile, some Supreme Court judges have mused aloud that shipments of the abortion pill could be halted under the 151-year-old Comstock Act: the 1873 anti-pornography law forbids mailing "lewd, lascivious" materials.

"It sounds as antiquated as my grandmother's corset," said Kay, expressing disbelief that this is even up for discussion. 

As for the Idaho emergency-room case, she said it's not an ER doctor's business: "Their job is to save lives and people's health. Not judge them. Not like, you know, 'If you were drunk driving, I'm not gonna treat you because I'm so opposed to this.' "

Then there are individual cases.

Texas woman appears in Biden ad 

Like a Texas woman who had a miscarriage  and couldn't get an abortion afterward. She nearly died and fears she'll never conceive again because of damage to her reproductive system.

She's now in a Joe Biden campaign video. It was first aired on Monday, after Trump made his abortion announcement.

It's a raw, emotional ad. In it, Amanda Zurawski starts weeping as she shows off some of the items she purchased for her baby, while screen captions tell her story.

The ad concludes with: "Donald Trump did this," referring to the abortion bans that swept across U.S. states, including 14 total statewide bans.

• Democratic, Republican state leaders in glaring contrast on abortion pills, reproductive rights
• U.S. abortion history fraught with resistance, unequal access and violence

Will Trump succeed at nullifying the issue? The answer could very well decide the 2024 presidential election.

His move Monday elicited mixed reactions from his own side. Some moderate Republicans were pleased . His former vice-president, Mike Pence, was not, calling it a slap in the face to religious conservatives, like him, who supported Trump.

On the left, there were complaints about the news media giving Trump exactly what he wanted out of this: A favourable headline.

Abortion, immigration will swing votes: Pollster

One pollster calls abortion a particularly thorny issue for Republicans. As immigration is for Democrats.

"Those two issues will draw the most blood," said Tim Malloy, an analyst for Quinnipiac University polls.

His own polls suggest a mere three per cent of Americans identify abortion as their top election issue, far behind the economy, immigration and preserving democracy.

But he says it remains more electorally potent than that number suggests. 

He credited it for Democrats' better-than-expected performance in the 2022 midterms, when they defied polls to hold the U.S. Senate, nearly hold the House and gain in state legislatures.

Abortion will stay in the news, Malloy predicted. As an example, he pointed to two court decisions in Florida just rendered on the same day.

One will trigger a six-week abortion ban in the state on May 1. Another will allow a referendum to change the state constitution to guarantee abortion access.

It will be on the ballot this fall, down the very same ballot as the presidential vote. It's given Democrats new hope that they might be competitive in a state they've recently written off.

"The right to choose is, I would think, the most visceral issue in America and the overturning [of] Roe v. Wade set fire to it," Malloy said. 

"The fire's still burning."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexander Panetta is a Washington-based correspondent for CBC News who has covered American politics and Canada-U.S. issues since 2013. He previously worked in Ottawa, Quebec City and internationally, reporting on politics, conflict, disaster and the Montreal Expos.

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No prescription? No problem. Birth control pills hit shelves.

• Deep Read ( 4 Min. )
• By Ali Martin Staff writer

April 3, 2024

For the first time, a birth control pill is available to women in the United States without a prescription, expanding access to those who have difficulty seeing a health care provider or choose not to.  

Opill, the once-a-day oral medication in question, became  available online in March , when it also started shipping to stores. The cost is $19.99 for a one-month supply or  $49.99 for three months . This relatively low price makes it more affordable for most women, even without insurance. 

Why We Wrote This

While many states have restricted reproductive health care, many women in the United States will now have the freedom of easier access to a more affordable birth control pill that they can get without a prescription.

Advocates are calling the new over-the-counter option crucial to reproductive health care overall. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that allows states to govern abortion policy, many states have restricted reproductive health care, says Cathren Cohen of the UCLA Law Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy. “Existing providers are struggling to meet patients’ needs.”

But some people are voicing reservations about the Food and Drug Administration granting unrestricted access to a hormone drug, especially for teenage girls. Removing medical doctors from the care chain, say detractors, leaves women to navigate reproductive health on their own. 

“Making it an over-the-counter option really just furthers this one-size-fits-all approach that has underserved women for so long,” says Emma Waters, senior researcher with The Heritage Foundation. 

For the first time in the United States, a birth control pill is available to women without a prescription, expanding access to people who have difficulty seeing a health care provider or choose not to. 

As states across the country grapple with abortion rights – whether protecting, restricting, or banning abortion – contraception exists in a less controversial space. But in the greater conversation about reproductive health care, advocates call this over-the-counter option crucial. 

“We still have health care deserts across the country,” says Cathren Cohen, staff attorney at the UCLA Law Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy. “And so being able to just go directly to the pharmacy and purchase it there is a really amazing opportunity and very important.”

Some people are voicing reservations about the unrestricted access to the hormone drug, Opill, especially for teenage girls. Removing medical doctors from the care chain, say detractors, leaves women to navigate reproductive health on their own. 

“Making it an over-the-counter option really just furthers this one size fits all approach that has underserved women for so long,” says Emma Waters, senior researcher with The Heritage Foundation. “[Opill] doesn’t empower them in the ways that it seeks to.”

Maria had her mom for guidance. The 19-year-old University of San Francisco student went on birth control last summer, after her first year away at college. She had to wait until she got back home to Chicago so she could see her family doctor for a prescription. 

“Before last year, I didn’t have insurance. I didn’t have an established doctor here,” says Maria, who withheld her last name for privacy. Over-the-counter birth control, she says, “would have come in handy.”

Now, that’s an option. And it’s as easy as clicking on Amazon. 

Choices of contraceptive

Opill’s main ingredient – norgestrel – has been in use since 1973, with a prescription. It’s also called the “mini pill” because it contains only one hormone (most birth control pills have two). The Food and Drug Administration approved it  for nonprescription sales in July 2023. The once-a-day oral medication became available online in March, when it also started shipping to stores.

The cost is $19.99 for a one-month supply, or $49.99 for three months. The relatively low price makes it affordable for most women, without insurance. 

A 2022 survey shows  90% of women ages 18 to 49 have used contraception. There are a dozen different types: shots, pills, and implants for women, which all require prescriptions; sterilization procedures for both men and women; and barrier methods, like condoms. Emergency contraception (certain types are commonly called “morning-after pills”) does not require a prescription – but the $50 price tag is high for some. Other women simply track their own menstrual cycle to avoid unwanted pregnancies. 

An analysis of the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows more than a third of females age 15 to 49 who use contraception rely on sterilization. Another 21% use birth control pills, followed by long-acting reversible contraception (16%), like IUDs and implants. 

Maria, in San Francisco, chose a “rod” – or small implant – that goes in her upper arm and releases hormones to provides birth control over an extended period of time. “It was one time, and I’m done for three years,” she says.  

Safer than nothing?

Some people try more than one prescription before finding the right fit. And sex isn’t the only reason they initially seek it out. 

Seventeen-year-old Kat said that she wanted to try birth control pills to mitigate uncomfortable periods, so her mother took her to a doctor who provided a prescription. The Bakersfield High School student has since become sexually active and says that the safeguards of being on birth control outweigh any concerns she has about possible side effects. This can be especially true, she says, for other teens who may not have a trusted adult to turn to. 

“They might have really strict parents and they are trying to rebel, or they just want to try new things, you know?” says Kat, who also wanted her last name kept private. “I feel like [Opill] is safer” than using nothing.

Maria, too, says Opill is a good option for people with limited options – like women in rural or impoverished communities, and “especially in some states where they don’t have access to abortion but they were to get pregnant,” she says. “This is just another preventative measure for those people.” 

By one estimate, 19 million women live in “contraception deserts” – areas without easy access to a health clinic that offers a full range of contraception. It’s in that context, says Ms. Cohen, that nonprescription birth control is especially important.

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that allows states to govern abortion policy, many states have restricted care. Existing providers are struggling to meet patients’ needs, says Ms. Cohen, and over-the-counter birth control “is a safe and valuable opportunity for people to access contraception without needing to make, wait for, or pay for a doctor’s appointment that will surely help increase access to care.”

It’s those women – living in marginalized communities – who face the greatest disadvantage when looking for contraceptive care, says Ms. Waters, who warns that the new, over-the-counter access encourages a laissez-faire approach to birth control. “We’re basically telling women that they don’t need time with a doctor,” she says. “Their concerns, whatever they are, whatever their motivation is in using birth control, are something that they can handle on their own.” 

The role of pharmacies

A 2022 study shows nearly 90% of Americans live within 5 miles of a pharmacy. And as of last year, the use of retail health clinics – the ones found inside a pharmacy like CVS or Walgreens – was up 200% over five years. More than half of states empower pharmacists to write prescriptions for birth control.

A different survey found more than three-fourths (77%) of women ages 18 to 49 believe birth control should be available without a prescription if research proved it to be safe and effective. In addition to being approved by the FDA, Opill is endorsed by the country’s major medical associations. 

By all accounts, Opill is not for everyone. And whether or not they consult a medical specialist, most women have an abundance of information at their fingertips. 

“It varies for everyone,” says Maria. “I mean, we all have access to Google nowadays.” 

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Tradwives, stay-at-home girlfriends and the dream of feminine leisure

Some young women see patriarchy as a solution, not a problem. what in ‘the feminine mystique’ is going on here.

I t’s always inspiring when citizens of the vast and disparate internet find something to unite them, and in late March, the unifying force was hatred for an essay, published in the Cut, called “ The Case for Marrying an Older Man .” It was written by a woman who had done just that: Grazie Sophia Christie spent her undergraduate years at Harvard sneaking into receptions for MBA candidates where she hoped to bag a more established male before her “fiercest advantage” — her youth — disappeared and rendered her common. After some trial and error, at the age of 20, she made off with a 30-year-old whose defining characteristics seemed to be that he was French and rich.

The essay’s alleged offenses ranged from the kind that would irritate Greta Thunberg — the casual way Christie’s byline notes that she lives in “Miami and London” — to the kind that would irritate Gloria Steinem. “I’ll never forget it,” the author writes, “how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it.”

Christie was taking a cosseted, retro archetype — the gold digger — and presenting it as something intellectual and liberated. She hadn’t wanted to marry a fixer-upper, she writes, citing her younger brother who still left his towels on the floor. She wanted a man that some other woman had already fixed up, and who could, in turn, fix her. Not a partner, she writes, but a “mentor.” Specifically, one who could fulfill a promise that feminism had allegedly failed to deliver: “I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal,” writes Christie, “and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.”

A thing called ease.

That last sentence was the only one in the whole piece that made me stop in my tracks. It was breathtaking in its transparency: I’m not doing this out of principle or based on a worldview. I’m doing this because life seemed hard and this seemed easy.

You could argue, as many did, that if your relationship is predicated on you being young, it might get considerably less easy when you age. But castigating Christie’s essay was actually the least interesting way to engage with it, because, at heart, it was dealing with bigger themes than even she seemed to know what to do with: The elusiveness of female contentment in the modern era. The elusiveness of rest — for everyone — in the modern era. The concept of romantic relationships as the ultimate life hack, and the resigned idea that the only way to move forward is by moving backward.

Perhaps you’ve been seeing the term “tradwife” lately, a modern coinage for a TikTok-fluent married woman who keeps house, extols “traditional” values and yields to her husband. Perhaps you’ve even seen the term “stay-at-home girlfriends,” the influencer community’s true prophets of female ease. Unlike stay-at-home moms, whose days might be filled with school drop-offs and toddler-wrangling, the childless SAHG’s days are filled mostly with home care and self care: elaborate skin, fitness and food routines that keep their bodies beautiful and their lives serene for the boyfriends who are, after all, funding the whole shebang.

In one SAHG video, I watched a platinum blonde explain that her boyfriend agreed to pay for all of their travel if she would do all of the packing. The rest of the video was dedicated to the most meticulous suitcase job you’ve ever seen — sunglasses nestled in shoes, a rainbow of rolled shirts — which appeared to take her the better part of an afternoon.

Another video featured a young woman in a negligee patiently curling her hair while an overlay of text read: “People used to ask me, ‘what’s your dream job?’ I never knew the answer. I realized it’s because I don’t dream of labor. I dream of living a soft, feminine life.” The video was captioned, “I dream of feminine leisure,” which I soon realized was a sort of motto among this set.

“I dream of feminine leisure,” wrote a lovely brunette as she sauntered to the pool in a floaty coverup.

“I dream of feminine leisure,” wrote another lovely brunette as she applied a fresh coat of lip gloss at her vanity.

The comments on these types of videos abound with wistful envy: heart emoji, lipstick kiss emoji, green juice, vacuum.

W hat is feminine leisure, exactly? Is it a set of prescribed activities? An aesthetic? A vibe?

The simple answer is that it’s a solution — maybe not a good solution, but a conceivable one — to a problem. A problem some young women have diagnosed in the landscape of modern adulthood.

A frantic mother of a 16-year-old wrote into Slate’s Care and Feeding advice column a few months ago to say that her formerly go-getter daughter had announced that she wanted to skip the rigors of college and instead focus on maintaining her appearance for a future husband. “She’s now talking about how great the ‘patriarchy’ is,” wrote the alarmed mom, “and how she can’t wait for someone to come and take care of her.”

From Christie to tradwives to SAHGs to the Patriarchy Daughter, the common thread seems to be the concept that liberation is overrated. That women raised on the virtues of female independence have been sold a bill of goods. Yes, we are allowed to have successful careers. But nobody had decreased the amount of laundry or errands that still needed to be run. Nobody had added any more hours onto the clock.

The Wall Street Journal recently detailed a new paper to be published in the journal Social Indicators Research that found that, “regardless of how the question is asked or what measure is used, women say they are more anxious, more depressed, more tired and more pessimistic than men,” the Journal said. At the same time, though, women are also more likely “to say they are happy and satisfied with their lives.”

It’s a phenomenon known as the “female happiness paradox,” and researchers can’t really explain it.

One guess cited in the article is that the measuring stick itself is off: Men, after all, are the ones who die more often by suicide, drug overdoses and alcoholism. So maybe it’s not that they are less anxious and depressed than women, but that, conditioned to be taciturn, they are less likely to report it. Another guess is that the things that stress women out — children, relationship-building, achieving work-life balance — are also the things that give them the most satisfaction.

Regardless of how to interpret the data, the facts of the matter remain that women are either miserable but happy or happy but miserable. And if scientific researchers can’t figure out what to do about this paradox, can 20-year-old women? Why knock yourself over trying? Crash the MBA reception. Curl your hair. Pack the suitcase. Choose ease.

I’ll pause to note that, generally, we see and hear much less from the men in these relationships than from their influencer wives and girlfriends; their voices are missing from this discourse. Maybe it’s because the mutual arrangement is working for them, but they’re afraid of being labeled sexist for admitting it. Maybe they don’t want to hurt their girlfriend’s feelings by explaining that they truly could not care less if their shirts are rolled. Maybe it’s just because they’re at their offices when all the lovely content is being made.

Whatever the case: I can imagine a lot of men would like to have a stay-at-home partner, not because they are misogynists but because it’s a relief when someone else has already done the grocery shopping — and I can imagine a lot of women would feel the same way. I can also imagine that a lot of men would like to saunter toward a pool in the middle of a Tuesday, or spend their days as Christie describes in the Cut: “Mostly I get to read, to walk central London and Miami and think in delicious circles.” So far, TikTok has not spun off an equivalent stay-at-home-boyfriend aesthetic.

The fact of the matter is that almost nobody who works for a living has the time they wish they did to look, feel or be their best, much less to cultivate a highly aesthetic relationship with a thing called ease .

What if the problem is not feminism but capitalism — specifically the American version, where work-life balance is a punchline? What if instead of 11 paid vacation days , as the average American gets, these women got the full month that is standard in the United Kingdom? What if instead of five (or six or seven) days a week, they worked the four days that countries such as South Africa and Belgium are piloting? Would that allow enough time to do a full skin-care regimen and pack a great suitcase? If college weren’t so ghastly expensive here, maybe that one lady’s daughter wouldn’t be so keen on the patriarchy as a route to leisure that bypasses the long, uphill road to financial independence.

It wasn’t fair when women had no choice to stay home. It’s not fair if women are working but are still doing the work of maintaining a home. It’s not fair if both men and women are trying to juggle it together and are still finding that there aren’t enough hours or dollars in a day.

Who wouldn’t dream of feminine leisure?

A few months ago, I decided to reread Ottessa Moshfegh’s brilliant novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation.” It’s about a young woman struggling so much with her grown-up life that she embarks on a plan to sleep through an entire year via a steady influx of prescription narcotics. The ending is ambiguous — but, the way I read it, happy: By the end of the experiment, she has finally rested enough to rejoin the world, which she does with a rejuvenated and more optimistic perspective than she had before.

I mentioned this to a friend, who looked at me funny.

“Oh,” my friend said. “I thought she died.”

W hile writing this, I learned that a colleague and I were both obsessed with an influencer with a tradwife aesthetic who made elaborate pastries while wearing a placid, unchanging expression that made her look like a high-functioning lobotomy patient. In 2024, was this satire, or serious?

The same co-worker had been served the SAHG skinfluencer videos that also populated my social media feeds. Could you imagine, we asked one another, spending 30 minutes a day washing your face?

Then I went home and started thinking about the most satisfying day I’d had in recent months: A bundle of accrued comp time had allowed me to take a paid day off work on a random Wednesday. I went to yoga, bought a fancy sandwich, booked summer travel, researched preschools and made a dinner that was, for once, assembled patiently and attractively and not after desperately Googling “15-minute dinner can of beans and one potato?”

There was a good amount of leisure in there — even a good amount of feminine leisure.

But here’s the thing: The day hadn’t felt satisfying because I had achieved harmony with my feminine destiny; it felt satisfying because I, like most other adult humans of any gender, have a long list of necessary tasks, and almost never enough time to get through them. American culture is not conducive to helping to-do lists get shorter. Workweeks are long, vacation is limited, preschools are not universal and must therefore be researched.

And dreams? Dreams are dreams.

I wondered about the women who seemed to be seeking a relationship solution to the societal and existential problem of unrest. Did they really want to have no control over their own finances? To have to ask for an allowance? How would they feel about themselves and the choices they had made in five, 10, 20 years? When their skin was going to get wrinkles no matter how well they had cared for it. When they had run out of ways to film their get-ready-with-me mornings.

Cosmopolitan ran a story last month about some women who had once identified as stay-at-home girlfriends but who don’t anymore. “If he is paying for your whole life and you don’t have any income at all, there will start to be resentment,” influencer Bella Greenlee was quoted as saying, later adding: “I would clean the house more than I had to, just to keep myself entertained. I didn’t really have a lot to do, so I was kind of going crazy.”

The solution to this messy moment in the history of gender and work is not to dream backward, to the way the middle class used to do it — women as pretty property and men as forced breadwinners — and decide that if today isn’t working, yesterday must have been. The solution is to wonder what we might do about tomorrow.

A few days after the “Case for Marrying an Older Man” essay came out, the New Yorker published an article that received much less vitriol and attention. It was a story about a woman named Alena Kate Pettitt , who had gained fame four years ago as one of the original tradwife influencers. Since childhood, she’d prized the idea of a well-kept home and well-set table, and, after marrying and getting pregnant, she quit her job to make such a life a reality. She ironed. She sewed. She took pictures of herself making banana bread and getting dolled up in 1950s-style clothes, and she posted them to Instagram.

Then, gradually and for a lot of reasons, she got tired of being an influencer. She didn’t like how her lifestyle, which she’d pursued out of genuine interest, had slowly become symbolic and politicized. She noted how her content had become an ouroboros: If she tried to post pictures of herself being domestic in jeans and a T-shirt, the reaction was “muted,” according to the New Yorker, while the dolled-up photos of retro housedresses went “through the roof,” she said. So she wore more dresses, and got more followers, and wore more dresses, and what she was doing started to seem progressively more like a myth than real life.

It was lacking, shall we say, ease. Even wrapping herself in a retro bubble hadn’t protected her from having to make difficult choices, engage in self-introspection, work hard, live life. Being a public-facing tradwife turned out to be just as false of a promise as having it all.

Last year, Pettitt made the radical decision to leave Instagram. Her son was about to start high school, and her family was planning a transcontinental move. It seemed like a good time to consider all of her life choices, she said. She’d always wanted to own a coffee shop. She thought she might go back to work.

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An Engineering Experiment to Cool the Earth

A new technology is attempting to brighten clouds and bounce some of the sun’s rays back into space..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Katrin Bennhold. This is “The Daily.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

After failing for decades to cut carbon emissions enough to stop the planet from dangerously overheating, scientists are increasingly looking at backup measures, some that would fight the warming by intervening in the climate itself. Today, my colleague Christopher Flavelle on the efforts to engineer our way out of the climate crisis.

It’s Friday, April 5.

So, Chris, you’ve been covering climate change for a while, but recently you’ve been focused on a very special project. Tell us about this.

Yeah, two things have been happening in climate change recently that are really important. Number one, records have been falling at alarming rates. Last year was, again, the hottest year on record. Much the world surpassed the important threshold of 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. So the world is getting warmer at an alarming rate.

At the same time, emissions aren’t falling. The message of the last generation has been, we need to cut emissions really to almost zero by the end of this century. And in fact, the reverse is happening. Emissions are continuing to rise.

At the same time, the number and characteristics of weather disasters have become really alarming. So the effects of that warming have become really clear. And it’s clear that the world is struggling to adapt to those effects.

So the other thing that’s happening at a high level is there’s more research and more consideration of OK, what if we can’t cut emissions fast enough? What if we’re going to have this really severe degree of warming? Can we do something else, maybe temporarily, to buffer those effects? And that’s led to this question of, what kinds of changes can we make deliberately to the atmosphere, to the environment that will maybe produce some sort of artificial cooling in the meantime?

So earlier this week I was able to watch, as scientists did, the first outdoor tests in the US on a technology that will aim to do just that. It’s called marine cloud brightening.

So what is this idea of brightening the clouds? Where did it originally come from?

So everyone I talked to pointed back to one really important moment in 1990 when a British physicist named John Latham was taking a hike in Wales with his young son. And they were looking out at the clouds over the Irish Sea.

And as Dr. Latham later told it, his son asked him, “Hey, why are clouds bright?” And Dr. Latham said, “Well, because they reflect sun right back in the sky.” And his son said, “So they’re like soggy mirrors.”

And Dr. Latham went on to write a letter in 1990 that was published in the Journal Nature, saying, you know what, if we can deliberately manipulate these clouds, maybe we can make them more reflective and actually counteract the effects of global warming. That was the inception point for this idea, and it led to decades of research culminating in this week’s test.

So the idea is if you can make clouds more reflective, you can reflect more of the sun’s heat back into space. So it won’t get trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere in the first place.

Exactly. That’s what they’re trying to do.

That’s a very simple, and at the same time, a very powerful idea. I love actually that they were hiking in Wales. That’s where I am right now, and we sure have a lot of clouds here, rain clouds. But tell me more about what you saw at the testing site.

So this Tuesday, a little after 7:00 in the morning, I pulled up in a parking lot on a dock at the edge of Alameda.

I’m standing at the gangplank to the USS Hornet, a decommissioned aircraft carrier in San Francisco Bay here for the first test in the US of a machine that was designed to try to brighten clouds, a way of maybe temporarily cooling the Earth.

And I made my way up one of the massive gangplanks and came in to find a cluster of some of the top atmospheric scientists in the world.

Have you met Sarah?

How do you do?

Hi, Rob. How are you?

Looking really excited. And they accompanied me out to the flight deck —

Here we are.

— of this aircraft carrier.

Pretty epic.

It’s pretty great.

Which was a bit like a party. They’d set up a little table on the side with some coffee and some sandwiches, and people were chatting and saying hi to each other. And I asked them why they were excited.

So I know a thousand of what you know, and I still find this exciting. You guys, walk me through. Is this like a big day for you or just like one more test?

No, this is a big day for me.

And they said this was actually a huge day in their research.

Just looking at it, going, yeah, this is the culmination of years of work, right?

Wow, and tell me about what exactly they were so excited about and what they were doing on the ship.

Yeah, the thing everyone was excited about was this machine set up at the far end of the flight deck of this aircraft carrier. It’s blue. It’s shiny. It looks a bit like a snow maker or maybe like a spotlight.

This machine is a sprayer. What it does is it sprays really, really, really small aerosol particles, in this case, smashed up sea salts, a long distance at just the right size and just the right volume. Because in theory, at some point, you could use this machine to change the size and number of the droplets in the clouds. You can make them brighter conceptually it’s possible. The question is, technologically, can we do it?

Yeah, the particles are coming out in a super concentrated there. So whatever’s coming out of that circle there is basically going to be huge by the time it gets to the cloud.

And so the goal with this test was they spent years building this sprayer that can use really high pressured air to smash salt particles into super small bits, about 1,700th the size of a human hair.

What they didn’t know, until this week, and they’re trying to find out right now, once you spray it, do those aerosols that are so finely tuned stay that size? In theory, they should.

What they don’t know is, things like wind and humidity and temperature could potentially cause them to coagulate, to regroup, which would throw the whole thing off. If the aerosols you’re shooting into clouds are too big, you can backfire the whole purpose. You can wreck what you’re trying to do because you make clouds less reflective, not more reflective.

So the whole goal of the experiment is, OK, can they make the spray just so, so that even in outdoor conditions, the aerosols that are so finely sized remain the size you want them to be. And that’s what they’re trying to find out.

And you watched the actual test of this. What did you see? What happened?

Those instruments are emitting a slight hum.

So operating the sprayer is not straightforward.

And they’re filling the tanks with the salt water that’ll be used to produce the mist.

There was somebody crouched on the control deck, the panel of instruments at the side of the sprayer. So I went over and tried to sit next to him and watch him as he turned a series of knobs and careful sequence.

OK. Yeah, everybody, we’re going to run some air. So the — ... We need two minutes here just to have power on this.

And after a series of tests to make sure the valves were clear —

OK, ear protection, please.

— finally the moment came, and he got an all clear over his walkie-talkie. And he turned on the water —

Water on, copy, over.

— and the air.

[COMPRESSOR ACTIVATING]

Since the sound of the compressor pushes pressurized air through the sprayer, it’s making a dull, throbbing sensation. You can feel it a little bit through the deck of the ship.

We all had ear protectors. And even with the ear protectors, it was really loud. And then you can almost feel the spray bursting out of this machine and watch it travel really hundreds of feet down the deck of the aircraft carrier.

OK, water off, fan off. Good job.

Awesome, guys, you’re done. Thank you. Excellent.

First test is done.

My first signal that things have gone well was I looked up when the spraying machine was turned off and saw some scientists high-fiving down the deck.

What’d you think?

It’s beautiful.

Is it what you thought it would be?

It’s better. And I’m optimistic that it will tell us a lot about what these things do. This made me really optimistic.

And the idea is to do several short bursts like that through the day?

And everyone seemed really excited that this thing they’d worked on for years was finally happening in this really important outdoor test.

OK, so it sounds like this test was a success.

Yeah, they stressed that they need a lot of time to really go over the results. They’ll be doing this test again and again in different weather conditions. But the initial reaction seemed positive. They seemed to think that the numbers they were getting were what they were hoping to see.

And so now the goal is, can they maintain the right size aerosols even in different conditions down the deck of this aircraft carrier? That’ll give them some confidence that if they decided one day to try and do this on the open ocean to actually brighten clouds, they’d have the ability to do it.

So, Chris, if all of this works, how and when do these researchers anticipate that this would actually be used?

Well, here’s a great example. In the month of February, a version of this testing was also happening in Australia, off the Coast of Australia, where researchers were testing whether marine cloud brightening could be used to cool the ocean just a little bit around the Great Barrier Reef.

Really high ocean temperatures are causing bleaching of that coral reef. The idea was, could they use marine cloud brightening to save some of those reefs from dying? And that’s probably a good idea of the fairly localized situation, where you could, in theory if you do it right, have a fairly quick degree of cooling that could maybe try to avert or mitigate something pretty acute like a heat wave or a stretch of warm weather that would kill coral. But the science is probably too new at this point to talk about the right situations to use it. Those conversations are all down the road as researchers look at these and other ideas for what they could do if things get really bad.

We’ll be right back.

So, Chris, when I think about solutions to climate change, it usually involves these very hard things we need to do, like, change the way we live, the way we drive, what we eat. We need these international treaties. We need carbon taxes regulation. There’s lots of hard stuff, and we haven’t gotten that far.

But here you’ve just told me about this technology that, if it ends up working, could actually help cool the planet without anyone needing to do any of these hard things. It sounds great.

It does sound great. Now, we’ve got to say, first of all that whenever anybody working on this stuff talks about it, the first thing they say is this is not an alternative to reducing emissions. This is looking for ways to buy time as we try to cut emissions. There’s no way to really deal with climate change that doesn’t entail burning less fossil fuel and quickly.

But yes, in addition to brightening clouds, there’s other ways to try to bounce more sunlight back into space and other ideas. My colleague David Gelles wrote the first piece in our series looking the idea of removing carbon dioxide directly from the air, reversing our past emissions.

Other ideas include finding ways to suck up more of the CO2 in the oceans. There’s even ideas that my colleague Cara Buckley covered of could we build a sort of a giant parasol way out in space that would reflect or scatter more of the sunlight and prevent some of that sunlight from even reaching the Earth in the first place?

So there’s a huge number of ideas that until very recently seemed just so bizarre and/or so expensive and/or so dangerous that they were hardly worth pursuing seriously. And what’s changed really quickly in the last really year or two is all of a sudden those ideas have switched from being too wild to spend much time on to being so important because the situation is so dire that we can’t not look at them. And that’s the pivot that my team has been trying to cover.

And what characterizes all these initiatives is that rather than reducing our own emissions, we’re now trying to intervene in the climate in a proactive way, engineering the climate in a way.

Yes, and you hear the phrase geoengineering to describe these ideas collectively. And what people who research this will stress is, we’re already geoengineering. For more than a century, we’ve been geoengineering in the sense of putting climate changing pollution into the atmosphere that’s caused the planet to change by trapping more heat in the atmosphere. So the question is, do we want to deliberately geoengineer in a way that will ease that pressure rather than just making it worse?

Of course, there some controversy attached to this. And there are some pretty valid concerns about what the consequences might be if we keep on pursuing these ideas.

And why are they controversial?

Well, the first concern that you hear is this idea of moral hazard, that if people come to think that there are ways of addressing climate change that don’t require them to change their lifestyle or sacrifice conveniences or change the kinds of cars they drive or how their power is generated that they will lose interest in those tough changes. And the momentum, such as it is, towards cutting emissions will fade even more. But we don’t know yet whether politicians or governments or companies or just people will misuse these ideas to try to shirk the harder work of reducing the amount of greenhouse gases we emit.

Another really important argument you hear is, OK, side effects. Do we really know what would happen if we tried these things? Marine cloud brightening is one of those situations where there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns, as they say.

The known unknowns are, well, what would happen to things like ocean circulation? What would happen to precipitation? What would happen to the effect on the amount of energy reaching the ocean? What would happen to the fisheries industry? We don’t really know, and researchers are trying to find out, what those effects might be.

Then there are the unknown unknowns. If you start deliberately changing the cloud system, well, what else might happen that we haven’t anticipated? Do you move the location of where rainfall happens? Do you perhaps upset the monsoon cycle in India? Do you change the ability to grow food in parts of the world?

So if you do this at a bigger scale, the consequences of those potential side effects get more and more severe. And I talked to environmentalists who said that’s a real concern. You just can’t model those risks. And you, to a degree, by pursuing this, have to accept that risk is real and almost roll the dice.

And I guess much like climate change, where you have a group of countries that is most responsible for CO2 emissions that have caused the global warming and then a whole other group of countries that are probably suffering the worst consequences, even though they haven’t contributed to those emissions nearly as much, you might see a situation where this kind of interference with the climate at the initiative of some countries, presumably the wealthy countries that have that technology, would then have unintended consequences in countries that have no control over this. So that’s tricky.

That’s right. And that takes us to a third category of concerns, which is, OK, let’s assume that things are bad enough, that collectively societies want to take those risks of those side effects. Well, then who chooses, who decides when we get to that point? Is there even a mechanism that would allow you to get informed consent from everybody who’d be affected?

And if these would affect everybody, it’s hard to imagine how you would build a governance mechanism that would allow you to say, before we push the button, are we sure everybody is OK with this? The only counter to all of these concerns is compared to what? And this is the point that researchers make.

OK, this is dangerous. OK, it presents challenges, but compared to what? Their point is, don’t compare it to a situation where everything’s fine. Compare it to a situation we’re actually in, where the trajectory of global warming is so serious and isn’t looking like it’ll get better any time soon. Well, compared to those risks, how do these risks compare?

And the question is, would you rather have a world of basically uncontrolled warming? And we have an idea of what that brings, wildfires and drought and sea level rise and storms and diseases. Is that better than some of these more perhaps controlled risks associated with deliberately tinkering with the environment?

So it’s almost like pick your poison. What sort of threats do you want to embrace? And that’s the overwhelming dilemma that we face with this technology.

In a way, what it makes me think, is that these crazy initiatives that we’ve been hearing about from you are yes, they’re testament to our failure in a way to combat climate change so far, because they’re such a last resort, really, such as an act of desperation. But at the same time, it seems like this urgency has actually unleashed a lot of energy and money to tackle the problem.

Yeah, and there’s good news in this. The good news is, the research we’re talking about demonstrates the really amazing capacity of scientists to come up with new ideas, develop new technologies, test them quickly, and at least build some options.

So if there’s any rays of hope around climate change, it’s that humanity’s capacity to innovate and find new ideas is almost endless. So the question is not, are we pursuing the wrong research ideas? The question is, can we find good ideas fast enough to avert the really serious consequences of climate change that we’re already facing?

Chris, I just remember that scientist we heard in the tape from your visit. And she was so excited. And she said that she was really optimistic. I wonder, how are you feeling?

I think the frustration that you’ll hear among climate reporters, and I’m in this group, is that most people seem not to appreciate the severity of the situation that we’re in. There seems to be a view that we’re dealing with this. People are buying electric cars, and we’re getting more solar power and wind power. And things are going the right way, and this will be OK.

Things are not going the right way. Not only are we on the wrong trajectory in terms of emissions, we are so far away from being on the right trajectory for emissions that it’s hard to imagine us cutting emissions globally at a rate anywhere near fast enough to avoid almost unbearable consequences of global warming. So that’s the downside.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Here’s the good news, though. I do think, and this again I think is a view among other climate reporters, the capacity of scientists and of companies to change track and to find new products and apply new ideas is really impressive. It just doesn’t feel like there’s a connection yet between the urgency of the situation and the way people and companies and governments are responding.

And so I guess if the question is, how I feel about this? I am constantly amazed at the ingenuity of the researchers I come across in my job every day. What I don’t yet know about is whether or not society will move fast enough to adopt and apply those ideas before the conditions that we face from climate change become almost unbearable.

Well, Chris, on this cautiously optimistic note, thank you very much.

Here’s what else you need to know today. In a tense phone call with Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday, President Biden called the airstrikes that killed seven aid workers this week unacceptable and threatened to condition future support for Israel on how it addresses concerns about civilian casualties and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. It was the first time that Biden explicitly sought to leverage American aid to influence Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas. But the White House stopped short of saying directly that the president would halt arms supplies or impose conditions on their use as some fellow Democrats have urged him to do.

And a centrist group called No Labels has abandoned its plans to run a presidential ticket in this year’s election after failing to recruit a candidate. The group, which last year said it raised $60 million, had planned to put forward what it called a bipartisan unity ticket in the event of a rematch between President Biden and former President Trump but in recent months suffered a string of rejections from prominent Republicans and Democrats who declined to run on its ticket.

Today’s episode was produced by Michael Simon Johnson, Eric Krupke, Luke Vander Ploeg and Rachelle Bonja. It was edited by Patricia Willens, contains original music by Rowan Niemisto, Elisheba Ittoop, and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

“The Daily” is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Yang, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, MJ Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Michael Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schroeppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez, and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Special thanks to Lisa Tobin, Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson, and Nina Lassam.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Katrin Bennhold. See you Monday.

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• April 8, 2024   •   30:28 The Eclipse Chaser
• April 7, 2024 The Sunday Read: ‘What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living’
• April 5, 2024   •   29:11 An Engineering Experiment to Cool the Earth
• April 4, 2024   •   32:37 Israel’s Deadly Airstrike on the World Central Kitchen
• April 3, 2024   •   27:42 The Accidental Tax Cutter in Chief
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Hosted by Katrin Bennhold

Featuring Christopher Flavelle

Produced by Michael Simon Johnson ,  Eric Krupke ,  Luke Vander Ploeg and Rachelle Bonja

Edited by Patricia Willens

Original music by Rowan Niemisto ,  Elisheba Ittoop and Marion Lozano

Engineered by Chris Wood

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

Decades of efforts to cut carbon emissions have failed to significantly slow the rate of global warming, so scientists are now turning to bolder approaches.

Christopher Flavelle, who writes about climate change for The Times, discusses efforts to engineer our way out of the climate crisis.

On today’s episode

Christopher Flavelle , who covers how the United States tries to adapt to the effects of climate change for The New York Times.

Background reading

Warming is getting worse. So they just tested a way to deflect the sun .

Can we engineer our way out of the climate crisis ?

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Katrin Bennhold is the Berlin bureau chief. A former Nieman fellow at Harvard University, she previously reported from London and Paris, covering a range of topics from the rise of populism to gender. More about Katrin Bennhold

Christopher Flavelle is a Times reporter who writes about how the United States is trying to adapt to the effects of climate change. More about Christopher Flavelle

Luke Vander Ploeg is a senior producer on “The Daily” and a reporter for the National Desk covering the Midwest. More about Luke Vander Ploeg

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