Persuasive Speech

  Choosing a topic for this assignment was a difficult decision to make. The trending topics of controversy are streaming in like score highlights today. What’s really startling are the critical issues that policymakers overlook while grandstanding. Just imagining how many other qualified administrators who never had a chance to make more reasonable suggestions made me ultimately decide to write this paper about the abortion issue because it seems like a top priority to me. To begin, let me just put on record that abortions need to be regulated. There honestly isn’t a critic who can legitimately argue whether abortions should have some type of policy enforced. This topic has been recently conflated beyond reasonable scope, devolved into a diatribe and is no longer a legislative reformation. The rhetoric has even been turned into a perverted campaign political platform for incumbents to petition their voters with. Abortion has been a contested debate for the past few decades and so far, there has been very little progress concerning the actual issue. 

   More medical contraceptive breakthroughs have recently been introduced as an alternative to an abortion procedure, but sadly, more late-term infants are aborted worldwide today than ever before. The good news is that the United States abortion rate has been steadily declining since 1970, and now is at its lowest level since abortion has been legalized because of public awareness and activism. Another troubling statistic I stumbled across was that adoption has also been at its lowest rate since the late 2000s and is also declining due to over-regulation and inept, underfunded adoption agencies.  


   The headlines concerning abortion are also often deceptive. There are different classifications of abortions such as ‘Early Term’, Late Term” and even “Live Abortion” demographics separated into their own statistics and purposely misrepresented in public forum. It’s also important to be aware of the term ‘rate’ versus ‘ratio’. The abortion rate per live birth is coined “ratio” per this paper’s concerns and will be the only statistic referred to for the assignment. In 2014, the CDC had contracted several institutes to conduct ongoing studies because the abortion ratio had fallen below the standard since 1973! Since 2014 the abortion ratio has risen back up steadily in almost all states and the legislation has remained stalled. 

   Many institutes have also developed polls to gauge whether the public is pro-life or pro-choice in an effort to persuade legislators out of their comfort zones, but to no avail. In recent months, I’ve recognized more people are engaged in the debate publicly than ever before. I’ve also noticed a few lawmakers ready to re-introduce a second heart-beat bill with the Democrat’s desired provisions included, and that’s great news. For as much progress I’ve seen concerning abortion, I fear the issue will gain no traction until the political parties get finished running the wheels off their delict caravan first. Abortion has been implemented as a corporate cash cow from doctors and politicians for decades until Congress suspended funds from questionable programs like ‘Planned Parenthood” and a plague of private abortion clinics was found with fraudulent credentials and illegal ‘harvesting methods’. Lawyers and politicians have a tendency to use vague terms when describing sensitive issues so not to disturb the manufactured outrage. When people realized the actual facts concerning abortion clinics, they will have little choice but to lean pro-life. The pro-life trend is, in fact, overtaking the pro-choice crowd as I speak and it’s ultimately because more people are becoming aware of what abortion clinic executive habits.  


  Right now, I see a cross-roads of dead-ends because of the many failed social experiments conducted by special interest groups posing as peer activists. The public sees the threat but is unable to properly relay it’s a description to others. Every social movement that turns into a political campaign falls flat on its face and I honestly fear the abortion issue will remain another failure. There will be too many lawyers, drug companies, and medical special interest groups working hand in hand with elected officials to keep abortion manipulated and full of loopholes purposely. There will always be a team of corporate lawyers petitioning for their own greasy palms. The time has finally come when the people can convince Congress to pass conservative right to life acts for infants, but nobody seems to take an initiative to keep the legislative ball rolling. Republicans could easily put a proposal together for the Democrats to look like swamp slime rejecting right before mid-terms but they are either too weak, incompetent or simply bought. I see the issue being used as a crutch for another year at least, and that’s disturbing.  


 Our government has become experts at exploiting undesired circumstances. With so many ‘relief-funds’ ineffective foundations, useless committees and grey slush funds, it’s no wonder we don’t have this type of a debate about our personal right to harvest our own fresh water, fuel, tobacco, livestock, electricity, natural gas and anything else the government would be unable to profit from. What’s the difference to a corporate executive? Why haven’t these government agencies used our tax funds to build more orphanages, foster programs, exchange student facilities, runaway prevention programs, and vocational training for young adults? Why hasn’t our agencies done anything concerning inner city shortcomings or single parent hardships?  It’s blatantly obvious to me and many others watching that the abortion issue has become nothing more than a virtue signal instead of a model milestone for humanity. Our country should be setting more standards.          

 Public health monitoring is a systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of outcome-specific data for use in public health allocation and funding disbursements. The approach to problem-solving includes using data to assess the effectiveness of interventions. Without accurate and timely data, public health programs suffer. The CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health monitors maternal, infant mortality and the most serious reproductive health complications. The major surveillance systems in the division include the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, the National ART Surveillance System, and the Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System and Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 

 The CDC and other organizations developed the Sudden Unexpected Infant Death Case Registry, monitors teen pregnancy and the number and characteristics of women obtaining legal induced abortions in the United States. In 2014, 652,639 legal induced abortions were reported to CDC from 49 reporting areas. The abortion rate for 2014 was 12.1 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years, and the abortion ratio was 186 abortions per 1,000 live births. 

  Compared with 2013, the total number and rate of reported abortions for 2014 decreased 2%, and the ratio decreased by 7%. Additionally, from 2005 to 2014, the number, rate, and ratio of reported abortions decreased 21%, 22%, and 22%, respectively. In 2014, all three measures reached their lowest level for the entire period of analysis (2005—2014). 

  Women in their twenties accounted for the majority of abortions in 2014 and throughout the period of analysis. The majority of abortions in 2014 took place early in gestation:  91.5% of abortions were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation; a smaller number of abortions (7.2%) were performed at 14–20 weeks’ gestation and even fewer (1.3%) were performed at ≥21 weeks’ gestation. In 2014, 22.6% of all abortions were early medical abortions. The percentage of abortions reported as early medical abortions increased 110% from 2005 to 2014, with a 1% increase from 2013 to 2014.  

  With new legislation on the horizon, the establishment doctors and clinics are clamoring to save their sinking ship by any means necessary. A reoccurring tactic commonly used is an argument of women’s freedom to choose whether to give birth or abort, while trading one moral high ground equally for the other as a response to this potential “infringement”.   The idea here is that maternal women are covered into making unjust decisions because of over-reaching federal policies like 1 HB 490, The Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017. Paid professionals argued that a heartbeat shouldn’t be the mile-marker of a living fetus, and funding should only be allocated on peer-reviewed medical efficacy facts. The bill was vetoed because the bill wasn’t organized enough to address the repercussions. There has been a bill passed that have prohibited sex-selective abortions, and other restrictions on abortion clinics in many states since 2013. Abortions have been outlawed after 11 or 15 weeks, in some states, and clinics are highly scrutinized with reporting. These steps are taken in stride, although in the right direction, our country seems to have fallen behind. Australia also has regulated the abortion process into province jurisdictions rather than federal policy, and I think our country should follow suit. Abortions should have been regulated in our country by now.