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| Abortion Reasonable Guidance | The trade-off between the rights of all parties would suggest that if society can say when completely no abortions can happen - the third trimester - that there must also be a time when the complete right to abort resides with the mother. Delivering a child into the world is a huge responsibility and a great numbers of times pregnancies are unplanned events. It is only sensible that the person bearing the greatest difficulties has a period of time to make a decision if she wishes to take that load: in this approach to the subject that would be the first trimester.
In such a way the right of society to create secular guidance that best address everyone’s needs has been met; the mother has been offered a rational period of time to make a decision if she wishes to take the responsibility of having a child and the incompetent right to abort if she should so decide; and the fetus has been granted a point in which it is undertakes the rights of an individual and falls under the protection of the law. And there is one more point to consider – it is the rights of the father.
A small number of people would say that a man who rapes a woman and fertilizes her would have any rights in the choice to abort the fetus or not. Moreover, lots of people would grant that a husband at some point in the pregnancy should have his feelings considered and his rights as the father protected.
Another time this becomes a subject of compromise. The father’s rights are less than the mother’s if she has been granted the choice to abort in the first trimester and in some degree during the second the rights of the child substitute for all others. This leaves that period of the second trimester that brings to the medical determination that the fetus has a practical chance of survival outside of the womb. This is the time it would be sensible to grant the father an identical say in the decision to abort, and require his consent by law to do so.
As with many areas in our society, the correct way forward is often a compromise of what we as individuals think is best. While at times difficult to accept, our greatest responsibility resides with building a better world for our children, not getting our way. On a planet with such variety of thought combined with the technological ability to destroy ourselves, learning the compromise essential to live in harmony with one another may be the only option we have left.
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