Legal Abortion : Ethics and Development

Abstract

Abortion is one of the public health issues that has been getting attention and has been arguing extensively. Two important aspects of these arguments are ethics and development aspect. On the ethical argument, the restrictive abortion law faces the problem of women rights violation as well as the legal abortion law that face the problem of child rights violation. On the development argument, the restrictive law causes many forms of economic costs, for instance, the healthcare expense for women with illness from unsafe abortion, economic losses from abandoned child’s crime and economic losses from decreasing in the number of skilled labor because of adolescent dropout from school to become a teen mother. In the context of Thailand, that has the restrictive abortion law, adopting the concept of legal abortion are seems to be the right intervention against unsafe abortion and other related problems. Nevertheless, legal abortion also has the economic costs that are the cost of investing and distributing the safe abortion service therefor the government should study and research more about the economic cost and benefit of legal abortion. Moreover, the government should operate public discussion in order to develop optimal abortion policies.