Hernan Marcos MAT: 296303 Maria de Lourdes Molina MAT: 239016 Salvador Zambrano

Abortion: First part

Our work for the second partial is going to be about Abortion. Since all the members of our team are catholic, we think of this as something really important to have in mind and know about it, because it is becoming really common in every part of the world, and is something that should take inmediate action to stop. This is a very controversial topic because everybody has different opinions about it. Some consider it murder, others not. Some consider it women's right, others consider it the baby's right to life. Some consider them products, others humans. Some consider it acceptable before 12 weeks, others don't consider it at all. This opinions are divided into to groups, the Pro-life movement, which think of the baby's right to live, and think abortion should not be legal, and the Pro-choice movement, which thinks women have the right to choose if they want to have the baby or not. This people think that the baby has no right to life, and the woman should be able to correct her mistake and abort. As you can see there a lot of different point of views about abortion, and it is our job for this paper to give the best opinion on what to think about it, judge it, and act upon it. According to the Princeton University, abortion is The cessation of pregnancy or fetal development; a miscarriage; An induced abortion; The act of inducing abortion; The immature product of an untimely birth; Arrest of development of any organ, so that it remains an imperfect formation or is absorbed, There is something really important in this definition that is worth mentioning. They never consider the baby a mere product, they never say it is a human being, and that is the key point in the abortion disccussion, but that will be adressed later. In general, there are two different types of abortion, the induced, and the spontaneous. The spontaneous abortion, commonly known as misscarriage, is the end of a pregnancy for reasons not induced, not done on purpose. This is not considered something bad, because nobody had anything to do about it and is considered something natural. The induced abortion is divided also into two. The first one is called therapeutic abortion, in which an abortion is induced in order to save the mother's life. The second type is the one we refer to when we say the word abortion. It is called elective abortion, in which somebody, usually the mother, decides to end the pregnancy for any cause. This is the type of abortion that generates all the controversy, and the one we are going to talk about during the whole length of this paper. Abortion is not something new, it has been here since the time of christ.

It has been induced by various methods including abortifacient, sharpened tools and some more aggressive methods such as physical trauma. There are records from the 2nd century of a greek physician that suggested heavy excercise, carrying heavy things and riding animals as methods to induce abortion. This didn't chance until the middle ages, where abortion was legal. This chance when pope Sixtus V declared the abortion a homicide regardless the stage of the pregnancy. The firsts countries to legalize abortion during contemporary times are Sweden, the Soviet Union, and Iceland, all during the first half of the 20th century. The methods used for abortion have changed drastically during the last half of the 20th century and the beggining of the 21th. In this century there are two types of abortions, the surgical and the medical abortions. Medical abortion are non-surgical procedures that use pharmaceutical drugs, this constitue 13% of all abortions in the U.S. The drugs most commonly used are methotrexate, mifepristone, and als prostaglandin. Surgical abortion also has different methods. In the first 12 weeks, suction-aspiration (consist of removing the fetus using a manual syringe, ot electric pump) is the most commonly used. From the 15th to 26th week, the Dilation and curettage ( it cleans the uterus with a curette) is the most common method. For this methods, the Royal college of obstetricians and gynaecologist reccoment and injection that stops the fetus' heartm so that it is not born alive. This is a key point, because they mention that it it ALIVE, so it is thecnically homicide. There are also other different methods, but this are the most common ones, used both legally and illegaly around the world.