The abortion debate is a longstanding, ongoing controversy that touches on the moral, legal, medical, and religious aspects of induced abortion. In English-speaking countries, the debate most visibly polarizes around adherents of the self-described "pro-choice" and "pro-life" movements. Pro-choice emphasizes a woman's right to bodily autonomy, while the pro-life position argues that a fetus is a human deserving of legal protection, separate from the will of the mother. Both terms are considered loaded in mainstream media, where terms such as "abortion rights" or "anti-abortion" are generally preferred.
Each movement has, with varying results, sought to influence public opinion and to attain legal support for its position. Many who take a position argue that abortion is essentially a moral issue, concerning the beginning of human personhood, rights of the fetus, and bodily integrity. The debate has become a political and legal issue in some countries with anti-abortion campaigners seeking to enact, maintain and expand anti-abortion laws, while abortion-rights campaigners seek to repeal or ease such laws and expand access to the procedure. Abortion laws vary considerably between jurisdictions, ranging from outright prohibition of the procedure to public funding of abortion. The availability of safe abortion also varies across the world and exists mainly in places that legalize abortion.
Overview
In ancient times, issues such as abortion and infanticide were evaluated within the contexts of family planning, gender selection, population control, and the property rights of the patriarch. Rarely were the rights of the prospective mother, much less the prospective child, taken into consideration. Then, as now, these discussions often concerned the nature of humankind, the existence of a soul, when life begins, and the beginning of human personhood.
Discussion of the putative personhood of the fetus may be complicated by the current legal status of children. Like minors in the U.S. a fetus or an embryo is not legally a "person", not having reached the age of majority and not deemed able to enter into contracts and sue or be sued. Since the 1860s, they have been treated as persons for the limited purposes of offence against the person law in the UK including N. Ireland, although this treatment was amended by the Abortion Act of 1967 in England, Scotland and Wales. Furthermore, there are logistic difficulties in treating a fetus as "the object of direct action". As one New Jersey Superior Court judge noted, "If a fetus is a person, it is a person in very special circumstances – it exists entirely within the body of another much larger person and usually cannot be the object of direct action by another person." Proposals in the current debate range from complete prohibition, even if the procedure is necessary to save the mother's life, to complete legalization with public funding.
Terminology
Many of the terms used in the debate are seen as political framing: terms used to validate one's own stance while invalidating the opposition's. For example, the labels "pro-choice" and "pro-life" imply endorsement of widely held values such as liberty or the right to life, while suggesting that the opposition must be "anti-choice" or "anti-life". Terms used by some in the debate to describe their opponents include "pro-abortion" or "pro-abort". However, these terms do not always reflect a political view or fall along a binary; in one Public Religion Research Institute poll, seven in ten Americans described themselves as "pro-choice" while almost two-thirds described themselves as "pro-life". Another identifier in the debate is "abolitionist", which harks back to the 19th-century struggle against human slavery.
Appeals are often made in the abortion debate to the rights of the fetus, pregnant woman, or other parties. Such appeals can generate confusion if the type of rights is not specified (whether civil, natural, or otherwise) or if it is simply assumed that the right appealed to takes precedence over all other competing rights (an example of begging the question).
The appropriate terms with which to designate the human organism prior to birth are also debated. The medical terms "embryo" and "fetus" are seen by some anti-abortion advocates as dehumanizing, while everyday terms such as "baby" or "child" are viewed as sentimental by some abortion rights advocates.
The use of the term "baby" to describe the unborn human organism is seen by some scholars as part of an effort to assign the organism agency. This assignation of agency functions to further the construction of fetal personhood.