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Arguments on Abortion

Read the below passage by Gregg Easterbrook, then answer the questions which follow.

Standard: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.9-10.5 Analyze in detail how an author’s ideas or claims are developed and refined by particular sentences, paragraphs, or larger portions of a text (e.g., a section or chapter).

Abortion and Brainwaves

No other issue in American politics stands at such an impasse. Decades after Roe v. Wade, the abortion debate remains a clash of absolutes: one side insists that all abortions be permitted, the other that all be prohibited. The stalemate has many and familiar causes, but a critical and little-noticed one is this: Public understanding has not kept pace with scientific discovery. When Roe was decided in 1973, medical knowledge of the physiology and neurology of the fetus was surprisingly scant. Law and religion defined our understanding, because science had little to say. That is now changing, and it is time for the abortion debate to change in response.

Quietly, without fanfare, researchers have been learning about the gestational phases of human life, and the new information fits neither the standard pro-choice position nor the standard pro-life position. As far as science can tell, what happens early in the womb looks increasingly like cold-hearted chemistry, with the natural termination of potential life far more common than previously assumed. But science also shows that by the third trimester the fetus has become much more human than once thought–exhibiting, in particular, full brain activity. In short, new fetal research argues for keeping abortion legal in the first two trimesters of pregnancy and prohibiting it in the third.

This is a message neither side wants to hear. But, as the Supreme Court prepares to take up the abortion issue for the first time in nearly a decade, new fetal science may provide a rational, nonideological foundation on which to ground the abortion compromise that currently proves so elusive. And, curiously enough, by supporting abortion choice early in pregnancy while arguing against it later on, the science brings us full circle–to the forgotten original reasoning behind Roe....

- Gregg Easterbrook (2001)

1. Underline the thesis statement in the first paragraph, then re-write it in your own words below.

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2. Underline the topic sentence in the second paragraph. How does it support the author's thesis?

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3. It is not until the last sentence of the second paragraph that Easterbrook tells us what science says about abortion. Why does he wait to tell us until after his thesis statement?

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