Abortion Rights and the Influence on America
...oon on the flight of Apollo XIV. On a less positive note, the U.S. Supreme Court was still fighting to fix the injustices of segregation. During that year they were fighting to uphold busing for desegregation. President Nixon ended a 21-year trade embargo with China. The company Intel introduced the microprocessor. And finally, the 26th amendment was passed, allowing the voting age to be lowered to 18 years of age. 1972 was a year America could have done without in regards to our top political leaders. What seemed to be a promising year, turned out to be a disgrace. President Nixon won the presidential election by a landslide of 47 million to 29 million. He seemed to be on top of his game but was quickly shot down by the Watergate scandal. Not long after the Washington Post connected the committee to elect Nixon to Watergate, President Nixon resigned from the prestigious position. Now to look back at the year a woman’s right to privacy and her own body was forever changed, 1973. As America embarked on the journey of the Watergate hearings they also were engulfed in the court case of the century. Roe vs. Wade would in one way or the other change the way people could make person and private decisions. Jane Roe, whose real name was Norma McCorvey, wanted the right to make a choice. This choice was to terminate a pregnancy, which came from an act of violence. She, like many others, was trapped by the limitation of the law. This case changed lives forever. The facts of the case are simple. Norma McCorvey, or Jane Roe, was a woman in need of help. She was raised in a poor, broken family. She ran away from home at age 10 and spent several years in reform schools. She married at age 16. Her husband beat her severely when she told him she was pregnant, and their marriage ended shortly thereafter. Norma wanted to keep the baby, but her mother took the baby away from her against her will. McCorvey later had an out-of-wedlock child whom she gave up for adoption. But when she again got pregnant out of wedlock, she decided she wanted an abortion. At age 21, she was poor, homeless, uneducated, an alcoholic, a drug user, and a lesbian. She was not in a good position to raise a child, and she did not want to give up another child for adoption. Abortion was illegal then, but McCorvey was introduced to two feminist lawyers who decided to use her as a pawn in order to legalize abortion. They needed a plaintiff in order to challenge the Texas law prohibiting abortion, so they convinced McCorvey to sign on to Roe v. Wade. McCorvey’s court case was not decided before the baby was due, so she gave the baby up for adoption. Eventually, Roe v. Wade reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and abortion was legalized in the United States. Their ruling was based upon the fact that a woman’s right to privacy was being encroached by making abortion illegal. After all, a woman’s body is her own business or so the court thought. For the last few decades’ abortion has been recognized as a fundamental human right by the highest court of the land. Abortion is still one of the controversial issues in America today. Many have pondered upon the meaning of abortion. Webster defines the term abortion as the induced termination of pregnancy and expulsion of an embryo or fetus. The argument of abortion to some is that every child should be wanted, and the others who believe that every child conceived should be born. To others it’s that Roe vs. Wade helped to protect woman from unsafe abortion. Abortion poses a moral, social and medical dilemma that challenges the way many of us think and feel. Since the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe vs. W...