Abortion as a moral good

Abstract

Once they leave, I use the case studies they provided to focus attention on the medical ethics of conscientious refusal and conscientious provision of health care. During the 1960s, some ministers and rabbis of Protestant and Jewish denominations openly decried abortion's criminalisation as immoral, and the Clergy Consultation Service that formed in 1967 referred pregnant parishioners to physicians who provided safe abortions in the years before the 1973 Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision legalised abortion across the USA. In the USA, 49% of abortion patients have incomes below the poverty line and an additional 26% have low incomes; 73% of abortion patients list “can't afford a baby now” as one of their reasons, and 23% list it as “the most important reason”. [...]social programmes remove economic barriers to childrearing, allowing low-income women and families the option of abortion prevents them from being pushed even further into poverty. Women cannot have social, economic, and interpersonal power comparable to men unless they can control whether and when they have children. [...]women's moral claim to equal opportunity requires access to abortion for pregnant women who want it.