Banning Abortion: Justified? By ABHINABA UPADHYAY
by  Abhinaba Upadhyay, M.Sc Physics NIT JALANDHAR

Sapiens as we may call ourselves, we are no different from other species with a strong drive for survival. The sole purpose that our life beholds is being able to survive through ages of evolution. Our civilization has witnessed the era of horse carts to the Industrial revolution, from disastrous wars to cold wars, from thermo-nuclear weapons to bio-weapons and let me make a point out here, amidst these entire nuisance what stayed constant is: reproduction of more and more of our kind, Homo sapiens. From what we have seen, statistical evidence has always been significant in a societal court. When the statistical evidence of a certain societal practice is negligible, we keep that unattended for a time long enough to turn it into a societal bomb. With the growth of the feminism movement, there has been a question in the mind of grass root feminists: “Should women not have the right to decide whether or not they want to bear a child?” This question has been marketed well through the densely framed society and here we arrive at a dilemma, ‘should abortion be banned or not?’ I would like to toss a coin to that thought. Oh, it’s a Head! Let’s go with a woman’s perspective: In the tech-induced work environment of this century, there’s been a significant participation from women in the work force in various industries. With the rise of automation, the dependency curve of our society on muscle power has significantly dropped and is approaching an asymptote. This being said, women are equally busy in their work life just as their male counterparts, and time has turned out to be equivalent to currency notes. In such a high performance work life it’s getting harder for women to bear and raise a child, time being a significant constraint in their respective lives. By design of our anatomical structures, as we know that bearing a child for several months would cut off a woman from her career and that’s why there goes a saying: ‘Her body, her choice’. So a significant number of abortions are being opted by working women, simply because of their unavailability to raise a child. On the other hand, there are a considerable amount of miserable cases like: abortion of rape victims, abortion of minor girls. These two cases are subject to being victims to our society and are opted for abortion out of compulsion and not as a conscious decision. Recently, the USA has banned abortion countrywide and this has led to a chaos worldwide. From this current perspective, it’s violating basic human rights and it’s simply not being able to decide for our own body. To set a resemblance, it’s like banning a clinical treatment for a certain body part. On the tails of this coin, we can perceive the effect of abortion on demography. As there has been a significant rise in abortion in the recent years, it is evident that there might be an effect on birth rate on a global scale. I am afraid to mention that so it is! We might be heading towards a population collapse! When the death rate of a species exceeds the birth rate of the species, then a population collapse is said to strike on the face of the population .As ethical as it may sound to have the right to opt for abortion, on the contrary we are alike all other species with a primitive goal of existing on the pillars of reproduction, followed by child birth. A few years back, primary schools were closing down in a tier two town of South Korea and in fact these are grave evidences that might face a population collapse in the future. Policies governed by demographic knowledge could be a sustainable solution for abortion. With utter sanity we can say that, rape victims and minors should be granted the choice of abortion. Instead, there could be rational laws governing the conscious choice of abortion. Also, countries with low birth rate could be providing financial benefits for families with children, in order to promote increased child birth and stabilize the demographic imbalance. Abortion in its very nature is a boon and of course not a bane, but purposeless use of such an option has led us to where we stand today!

PUBLISHED ON SUNDAY 19th February, 2023
Reviewed by     Physical Science Society