Bioethics & medical ethics
In What Circumstances Should Abortion Be Permitted?
LNAT Section B · Model essay
The essay prompt
Under what conditions, if any, should the law allow a pregnancy to be terminated, and what justifies drawing the line where it is drawn?
The stance
Abortion should be permitted, but in specified and safeguarded circumstances rather than without limit: where it protects the woman's life or health, where it respects her bodily autonomy before viability, where conception was non-consensual, and where there is severe foetal abnormality. The right answer is neither prohibition nor an unconditional licence, but a proportionate, gestationally bounded permission.
The case for
Risk to the woman's life or health: an actual life cannot be sacrificed to a potential one.
Where continuing a pregnancy threatens the woman's life or risks grave, permanent injury to her physical or mental health, refusing abortion compels her to bear a lethal or disabling burden for the sake of a being that is not yet a separate person in law. The UK Abortion Act 1967 reflects this, permitting termination at any gestation to save life or prevent grave permanent injury. To deny it is to demand that the law compel martyrdom.
The case against
The foetus has a serious claim to life that grows as it develops.
If the foetus is a potential or actual bearer of the right to life, then ending it requires very strong justification, and mere preference cannot suffice. This claim is why no legal system treats late-term abortion as casually as early termination, and it is the strongest reason to reject abortion "on demand" without limit.
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