Open topic Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Open topic - Essay Example This paper argues for morality of current laws that allows for abortion. Deontology ethics offers one of the bases for evaluating morality of abortion. According to the ethics, an act is moral if it is consistent with existing rules in a society and this means that reviewing such rules as the constitution are fundamental to understanding morality of abortion. Important to the abortion debate is the constitutional provisions for human rights and its protection thereof from contravening legislations. The Ninth Amendment of the constitution provides that citizens’ rights are supreme and no law can be made to create some rights that can infringe the former category of rights. Examples of the protected righst are rights to privacy and autonomy in decision-making. Pregnancy issues meet the privacy definition and should remain at a woman’s description, subject to the existing laws. Further, the same laws provide that such a right is supreme, no law should be made to contravene it, and this means that calls for illegalization contravene deontology ethics. While some people may argue that the defined rights in the Ninth Amendment also protect the fetus, such arguments can only be valid if the same constitution offered definition of fetus and provided for its rights. The Fourteenth Amendment however offers a solution to this problem through its definition of people who are entitled to rights under the constitution. One of its provisions is the phrase that ‘people who are born or are naturalized in the United States’ and this does not include fetus because it is not yet born. Consequently, the constitution, as an element of existing laws, protects a woman’s decision to have or not to have an abortion and arguments against such a position is Deontologically unethical (University of Minnesota 1). A person also has right to private property and this rationale grants a woman the right over her body and her body parts. The fetus is considerabl y part of a woman’s body as long as it is in her womb and this means that the woman has right over decisions affecting the fetus because of privacy and autonomy principles (University of California 1). Utilitarian approach to morality on abortion also guides the debate on whether abortion is moral and should be legalized or not. According to utilitarian ethics, an actor is moral if it offers net benefits to a majority of members of the society and immoral if its net effects are harmful to most of the involved stakeholders. Considering the case of an unwanted pregnancy, the child, the mother, and people in the environment are the involved stakeholders. An abortion terminates the child’s life but meets the interest of the expectant woman and the immediate society that already considers the child as unwanted. Forcing the woman to have the pregnancy however exposes her to rejection and rejection of the child that the woman may also reject and this leads to psychological ha rm to all the stakeholders. In such a case therefore, allowing for abortion benefits the expectant woman and the society while not allowing abortion identifies harm for all the stakeholders. Abortion would therefore be moral. The fetus is also not yet a human being and this means that it lacks feelings. Consequently, no harm can be attributed to abortion with respect to the fetus as a victim. This further means that a woman’s interest is important in an abortion case and the abortion should be legal