Essay on The Impact of Restrictive Abortion Legislation is published for informational purposes only. The free papers are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a quality Essay on Essay on The Impact of Restrictive Abortion Legislation at affordable prices please use our essay writing services offered by EssayEmpire.

Abortion is one of the most common and safest medical procedures that women age 15 to 44 can undergo in the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2010 Statistical Abstract, which combines figures reported by the Centers for Disease Control and the individual states, approximately 1.2 million abortions were performed in the United States in 2005. Among women aged 15 to 44, the abortion rate declined from 27 out of 1,000 in 1990 to 19.4 out of 1,000 in 2005. The number of abortions and the rate of abortions have declined over the years, partly as a result of improved methods of birth control and partly as a result of decreased access to abortion services.

The number of physicians who provide abortion services has declined by approximately 39 percent, from 2,900 in 1982 to less than 1,800 in 2000. Although some of the decline is the result of a shift from hospital-based providers to specialized clinics offering abortion procedures, this shift is further exacerbated by the number of clinics that have closed in recent years due to increased regulatory requirements that make remaining open more difficult. Moreover, the decline in providers of abortion services means that some women will experience a more difficult time in locating and affording services. Today, only 13 percent of the counties in the United States provide abortion services to women; that is, abortion services are unavailable in 87 percent of U.S. counties. Moreover, the Hyde Amendment preventing federal funds from being used to pay for abortion services was reaffirmed in March 2010 by President Barack Obama as part of an overall health care reform legislative package.

The Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) approval of Plan B, an emergency contraceptive best known as "the morning after pill" and mifepristone (RU-486) for early medication-induced abortions may be shifting the location of abortion procedures away from abortion clinics to other locations such as family planning clinics and physicians' offices. However, neither of these recent FDA approvals eliminates the need for reproductive health care that includes abortion care. While the issue of abortion may spawn disparate opinions about the meaning of motherhood, family values, the changing dynamics of male-female relations, and sexual morality, as well as raise issues about personhood and rights, unintended pregnancies disproportionately impact women and their children. This is especially true of poor women and women of color whose access to reproductive health care may be limited or nonexistent. Historically, women from the middle and upper classes have had access to abortion--be that access legal, illegal, therapeutic or non-therapeutic--while women from less privileged backgrounds have often been forced to rely on back-alley abortionists whose lack of training and provision of services cost women their health and, often, their lives.

References:

Ehrenreich, Nancy, ed., The Reproductive Rights Reader: Law, Medicine, and the Construction of Motherhood. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Ginsberg, Faye, D., Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community, rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Herring, Mark Youngblood, The Pro-Life/Choice Debate. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003.

Luker, Kristen, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Maxwell, Carol J. C., Pro-Life Activists in America: Meaning, Motivation, and Direct Action. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

McBride, Dorothy E., Abortion in the United States: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008.

Page, Cristina, How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics, and the War on Sex. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

Riddle, John M., Eve's Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Rose, Melody, Safe, Legal, and Available? Abortion Politics in the United States. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2007.

Shrage, Laurie, Abortion and Social Responsibility: Depolarizing the Debate. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Solinger, Ricki, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America. New York: New York University Press, 2005.

Free essays are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can order a term paper, research paper or custom TOPIC at our site which offers professional essay writing services. Get your high quality custom paper at relatively cheap prices. EssayEmpire is the best solution for those who seek help in essay writing related to TOPIC and other relevant topics.