Reality Is Greater than Ideality (The Revised Essay)

According to a report from the site of ReligiousTolerance.org, in August, 1996, there was a 21 year-old woman in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada being 5 months pregnant and hopelessly addicted to glue and solvent sniffing. Having previously given birth to three children, she had at least two of them permanently harmed in the womb as a result of her addiction. Social workers tried to obtain help for the woman, but she had refused treatment. In such a case, she had already violated her responsibilities of being a mother-to-be. Even though abortion is not the perfect answer, it could be a better solution to prevent another inborn harmed child.

Promising fetuses a future is to provide them with a complete and happiness-oriented future, not a broken and miserable one. Not only from the Canadian case, lots of women who suffer from rape or incest mostly give birth to their children unwillingly. In other words, their children are doomed to be disliked, or worse, ignored by their parents. If so, this kind of kids is very likely to commit crimes in their future since they cannot have a normal loving family and parents. Take a study of the American crime rates for example; since 1991, the rates have thirty to forty percent fall, half of which, according to experts’ analysis, mainly results from the legalization of abortion. They explained that there was a remarkable fall in crime rates occurring under the age of 25 and this is exactly the age group that would be affected by the legalization of abortion. Therefore, if we insist on illegalizing abortion and forcing those women to have their children, we are not only forcing those mothers to give birth to a child but also putting our society into a bigger risk—promised enhancing crime rate.

Pro-abortion advocates emphasize more on practical living capacity than on ideal right of living. Even though the Constitution has promised each one of us the right of living, there is an unclear area to define who are exactly the ones to be promised; does fetus have the right as well? Can we call fetuses human beings as well? These are issues that remain unresolved, but crimes are ongoing, so do the unwanted children keep being produced. Sometimes, unwanted children not merely involve in the parent’s unwillingness of raising them but also concern with the parents’ inability of raising them. Some poor young couples might not have full knowledge about contraception or might have financial problem in contraception. Under this kind of situation, if abortion is illegalized, which is like forcing those young and naïve mothers to give birth to as many children as them can’t avoid, it can only make those young and poor parents’ living situation worse. They will have no living quality, and their children might therefore suffer from hunger, such is the condition in most African countries.

Certainly, the Opposition would argue that those unborn fetuses are potential human beings; thus, they should have their basic human right to live. They claim that as long as the tiny organism has the possibilities to become a human being in the future, we should ensure their rights and treat them simply as human beings. There shouldn’t even be any conditions or limited circumstances to judge whether the fetuses deserve to live or not. However, between people having been born and fetuses still in wombs, we can still distinguish them clearly and obviously. In English, we call a human organism that leaves its mother’s womb a person; however, we never call fetuses people. In our belief, the difference between something and someone is consciousness. Apparently people are conscious. They can think and express themselves. Comparatively, a fetus, especially before the second and the third four weeks, is unconscious. It is a part of the flesh, not a human being. As a result, when we do abortion, we don’t call it killing, because killing results in death. Death is the permanent end of a life of a person or an animal, causing grief of the person’s family or other people’s anxiety about their own safety. However, abortion causes neither.

In my opinion, abortion is more a practical issue than a moral problem. If pregnancy can only bring misery and troubles, the beings that are already existing should be the ones we consider first, not those who are not formed yet. For reality is the foundation of ideality, without dealing with reality—living—it’s impossible to talk about ideality—the right of living.