There are also ethical considerations -- and this is where a lot of problematic areas can arise. What is ethical to one person may not seem ethical to another, and it can be hard to create guidelines for everyone to follow for each specific situation (De La Torre, 2004; Fagothey, 2000)
School policies may be considered the "laws" of the school, but they are not actual laws and should not be treated as such. The law is a delicate subject, and has to be addressed properly (Sarat, 2005)
The second consideration to be addressed legally is whether Donna can (and should) provide information regarding an abortion to Melissa. Strictly from a legal standpoint, there have been court cases that have addressed this particular issue (Stone, 2004)
Description of the Political Factors Affecting the Origin, Development and Implementation of the Policy Politically speaking the issue of abortion centers on the question of personal privacy rights. It is reported that the laws on the books and court decisions which followed relating to abortion and personal privacy rights have "over time been tied to two questions: (1) whether women have the right to have abortions; and (2) at what point does an unborn child have a claim to rights of its own? (Dionisio, et al
This is why the Roe v. Wade decision hinged on the constitutional right to privacy more than any other right (Balkin, 2007)
Con More sensible voices from the con perspective discuss issues like the emotional and psychological well being of the pregnant woman. When empathy and caring permeate the healthcare system, such psychological problems are not an issue (Cockrill & Weitz, 2010)
Donohue & Levitt (2001) go so far as to correlate legal abortion with crime reduction. States with greater access to abortion had correspondingly higher rates of abortion, and also had the greatest rate of crime reduction (Donohue & Levitt, 2001)
The most vocal cons of abortion come from religious sects, the individuals who belong to them, and other irrational groups. For example, one politician in Australia claims that rapists and pedophiles are in favor of abortion because it destroys evidence of their crime, and therefore abortion should be illegal (Gordon & Cook, 2014)
This position statement clearly outlines the ethical responsibilities of nurses in New York State when faced with providing abortion care, regardless of their personal values and beliefs. Virtue Ethics and Abortion Aristotle defined virtue as distinct from passion or faculties by declaring them states of character (Armstrong, 2006)
Whether they like it or not, many clinicians are caught in the crossfire between the diverse prolife and prochoice factions within American society. Successfully navigating the ethical intersection between the onslaught of new abortion legislation, best practice recommendations, and personal values may become even more difficult in the near future, especially in light of the Medicaid expansion extending contraceptive coverage to millions of minority Americans living near or below the poverty line (Burlone et al
83% of live births). A recent report examining the prevalence of contraceptive use along racial and ethnic lines looked at both age and contraceptive effectiveness (Dehlendorf et al
Nurses and the Ethics of Abortion Abortion and Virtue Ethics In the Crossfire: Nurses and the Ethics of Abortion In the Crossfire: Nurses and the Ethics of Abortion Nebraska's Attorney General, Jon Bruning, announced his efforts to revoke the license of the only nurse working at Dr. LeRoy Carhart's abortion clinic in a suburb of Omaha (Funk, 2013)
The responses revealed that nurses can be conflicted at times, but many nurses agreed this is nothing compared to what mothers face when confronted by an unintended pregnancy. To quote one of the nurses interviewed "It's the biggest decision that a woman ever has to make, to have a termination" (Lipp, 2008, p
What remains are the more nuanced controversies of fetal personhood, conflicts between patients' and nurses' rights, fetal viability, selective reduction in multiple gestations, and the use of abortifacients drugs. The role of a nurse when providing reproductive services was investigated by four research groups and all studies affirmed that women have three reproductive choices when faced with an unintended pregnancy: (1) abortion, (2) adoption, and (3) parenthood (McLemore & Levi, 2011)
S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) abortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by curettage or medications (Pozol, Creanga, Burley, Hayes, & Jamieson, 2013)
On the one hand abortion destroys life and on the other it represents just one of several equivalent choices along a reproductive decision-making continuum. The Nurses' Perspective A recent Gallup poll discovered that Americans are fairly evenly split in terms of prolife or prochoice views (Saad, 2013)
If the recent avalanche of more restrictive abortion regulation being passed into law by state legislatures is responsible for this trend, then a detailed examination of the prolife and prochoice positions is warranted. The Prolife Positions The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) has outlined five basic arguments they use to counter prochoice positions (Turner & Balch, 2013)
2 million abortions, and 1.1 million miscarriages (Ventura, Curtin, Abama, Division of Vital Statistics of the CDC, & Henshaw, 2012)
Feminist views and testimonies Women feel that it would only be normal for society to provide them with the opportunity to choose when to give birth and when they want to have a child. "To have choice in this area, women need not only contraceptives but access to safe, legal abortion if they find themselves with a pregnancy that they cannot complete" (Eggebroten 3)
b.) Roman Catholicism Although Catholicism opposes abortion, it acknowledges that "too many women had interest in contraception for its suppression to be entirely effective" (Maguire 56) and that it would be impossible for the Church to act as if abortion was not an important issue