1 Running Head: Abortion

Abortion HSCI 455- Health, Policy and Law Professor Alex Taylor Maria Delgado California State University, San Bernardino 02-24-11

2 Running Head: Abortion

Abortion is and will always be a huge controversial issue among Americans since we have two distinct points of view of whether it should be legal or an illegal action for women to do. On one side we have the pro-choice people who favor women in getting an abortion, while on the other side however; we have the pro-life people who are against women having an abortion. The case of Roe v. Wade directed to a more serious matter and even became the blame for the division among Americans, because it declared the procedure a fundamental right on Jan. 22, 1973 according to ProCon.org. Later it became a Federal action in which it declared most state anti abortion laws unconstitutional. In addition, this infuriated the pro-life people and they decided to push for federal legislation, in which it stated that it would restrict abortion. The Hyde Amendment bill was then introduced to all Labor, Health, Education, and Welfare departments to end Medicaid funding for abortions. President George W. Bush signed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and made it into a law that defines it as an abortion in which the provider deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother, or any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother, for the purpose of performing an overt act that the person knows will kill the partially delivered living fetus according to ProCon.org. The House of Representatives in March. 23, 2010 introduced the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to the president Barack Obama to establish an adequate enforcement mechanism to ensure that Federal funds are not used for abortion services. The president Barack Obama signed the act and it became a law. Statistics also showed that more than 45 million legal abortions were performed, in which is an average about 1.3 million abortions per year. According to ProCon.org One out five pregnancies end in abortion, women aged 20-29 receive 55 percent of all abortions, and 40

3 Running Head: Abortion

percent of all women have an abortion by the age of 45. However, since 1990 the annual abortion rate has been declining, fallen from 9 percent in the years of 2000-2005 to 19.4 abortions for every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44. In addition to this dilemma, according to the World Health Organization in Oct. 2006 Back-alley abortions cause 68,000 maternal deaths each year in the 33 countries where abortion is not legal or available. Moreover,