With the expansion of personal freedoms through the constitutional provisions, abortion has become a question of personal choice rather than a moral question. Yet there are those who still argue that individuals should not be given the prerogative to decide if they should carry their pregnancies to term, even if that pregnancy is as a result of rape. All these arguments are misguided. In this paper, I propose that the question of aborting or not should be left to the individual(s) who has the responsibility of bringing up the child if at all the pregnancy is taken to full term.
Proponents of Pro-choice argue that women who have procured an abortion have a higher propensity of suffering from a broad spectrum of mental health complications such as agoraphobia, panic attack, panic disorder, major depression, bipolar disorder and substance-abuse anomalies (Coleman et al. 45). Notably, these side effects are bound to affect women who have procured abortion and this is largely due to the fact that with opposition still coming from some sections of our societies, these women are denied their rightful societal place due to discrimination. Most of them balk away from the society as they suspect, and accurately so, that they will be discriminated against by the very people who are supposed to provide moral and psychological help. In fact, the propensity of these women to retreat into these psychological complications is a mark of the collective failure of our society to acknowledge the factors that necessitate abortion. In fact, if such women are readily provided with psychological support not just in terms of counseling but up to the family and community level, there would be no cases of these women relapsing into depression episodes.
