ABoRTIoN CASES

Briefing: Abortion Cases

[Name of the Writer]

[Name of the Institution]

Briefing: Abortion Cases

Abortions are usually performed without adequate skill because of laws that make safe, medically performed abortion services unlawful. Within the last two centuries, and particularly during the twentieth century, abortion has been criminalized. It was only in the closing decades of the last century that laws have recognized women's needs and rights to have access to safe abortion services.

Advances in medicine in time provided better understanding of human conception and gestation, directing more attention to fetal and embryonic life. For instance, the Roman Catholic Church, whose moral teachings had been reflected in laws of many European countries, had condemned abortion after the stage of development at which it believed the soul had entered the body before birth. In 1869, however, it accepted that protected life began at conception. This made abortion a crime in many legal systems at any stage of gestation. Modern developments in abortion laws can be traced from when abortion was controlled only as a crime to be punished to its later legal accommodation to protect the health and well-being of pregnant women and their dependent born children and to its modern recognition as a woman's right to lawful choice.

The Crime of Abortion

The laws of many countries, particularly those that experienced colonization by European countries and are influenced by religious doctrines, continue to view abortion only as a criminal offense. Some countries whose criminal laws punish the willful taking of human life reinforce the prohibition of abortion by adding, sometimes in their national constitutions, that human life begins at conception. Punishments vary from a few years' custody to life imprisonment. Under Nazi occupation, France imposed a punishment of execution. Almost all laws recognize, however, that abortion procedures aimed in good faith to save a woman's ...