3 cases study

Abortion Cases

You may choose one of the following cases or do a comparison of two of them. (from Contemporary Moral Problems, 4th ed., James E. White, pp. 139-140)

1) A Cancer Case: (This is an actual case, but the name has been changed.)

Mrs. Jones was a devout Catholic and was very religious. She was a wonderful wife and mother, and had eight children. She did not use any artificial method of birth control, and she became pregnant again. Tragically, it was discovered that she had cancer of the uterus. Rather than getting an operation to save her life, she decided to have the child and risk dying of cancer. She delivered the child successfully and died a short time later, leaving her husband with nine children.

2) The Punker

Jane is a twenty-three year old lead singer in a punk rock band, and she loves it. With the other male members of the band she takes drugs, and when she feels like it, she has sex. Sometimes she uses contraceptives and sometimes she doesn’t, particularly when she is on drugs. Despite her destructive lifestyle, she is very successful—after earning two gold records she has three new cars, two houses, and a couple of million dollars in the bank. During the recording sessions for her third record, she discovers that she is pregnant, father unknown. This is not a good time to be pregnant, for after the record she has a nationwide tour; if she cancels, she will take a big loss and also hurt the band. Besides, she thinks that motherhood is a drag, to say the least. So without giving it much thought, she has a quick abortion and then gets back to business.

3) A Rape Case

Suppose that a sixteen-year-old girl, an honors student, is living with her mother in New York City. One day while walking home from school, she is caught by a gang of thugs from a different neighborhood. She is raped and beaten in an alley one block from her apartment; nobody comes to her aid despite her screams and cries for help. She is left unconscious in the alley, and eventually she is discovered by the police and taken to the hospital. She has a concussion and a punctured lung, and she must stay in the hospital for three weeks. At the end of this time, just when she is about to be released, she finds out that she is pregnant. Her doctor advises her to have an abortion, but she is not sure what to do. She feels angry, hurt, and depressed. Should she get an abortion?

4) A Minor

In Alabama, state law forbids a minor (anyone under eighteen) to have an abortion without a parent’s consent. Kathy is a seventeen-year-old woman who is accidentally pregnant after having sex once with her boyfriend. Her parents are divorced, and she lives with her mother and an alcoholic stepfather who frequently abuses Kathy and her mother. She does not want to tell her mother or her stepfather about the problem because she is afraid she will be beaten by the stepfather. She wants to have an abortion, so she goes to an abortion clinic. The people at the clinic are eager to challenge the law about minors, and they offer to give her free legal representation if she takes the case to court. She goes to court, but the judge rules against her—she cannot get a legal abortion without her parent’s consent. Her lawyer wants to appeal the case to a higher court, but by the time Kathy gets to court again, the fetus will be viable, and she does not want to abort a viable fetus. What should Kathy do?

5) Mrs. Sherry Finkbine and Thalidomide

In 1962 Mrs. Sherry Finkbine, the mother of four normal children, became pregnant. During the pregnancy, Mrs. Finkbine had trouble sleeping, so without consulting her physician, she took some tranquilizers containing the drug thalidomide, which her husband had brought back from Europe. In Europe the sedative was widely used.

Later Mrs. Finkbine read that a number of severely deformed children had been born in Europe. These children’s limbs failed to develop, or developed in malformed ways; some were born blind and deaf, or had seriously defective internal organs. The birth defects had been traced to the use in pregnancy of a widely used tranquilizer whose active ingredient was thalidomide, the very tranquilizer that she had taken.

Mrs. Finkbine went to her physician, and he confirmed her fears. The tranquilizer did contain thalidomide, and she had a very good chance of delivering a seriously deformed baby. The physician recommended an abortion. Mrs. Finkbine then presented her case to the three-member medical board of Phoenix, and they granted approval for the abortion.

In her concern for other women who might have taken thalidomide, Mrs. Finkbine told her story to a local newspaper. The story made the front page, and it wasn’t long before reporters had discovered and published Mrs. Finkbine’s identity. She became the object of an intense anti-abortion campaign, and she was condemned as a murderer by the Vatican newspaper.

As a result of the controversy, the medical board decided that their approval for an abortion would not survive a court test because the Arizona statute at that time allowed abortion only to save the mother’s life. So the board withdrew their approval.

Eventually Mrs. Finkbine found it necessary to get an abortion in Sweden. After the abortion, Mrs. Finkbine asked if the fetus was a boy or a girl. The doctor could not say because the fetus was too badly deformed.

Do you think Mrs. Finkbine acted wrongly in having an abortion?