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Abortion in the United States has been and remains one of the most controversial issues in United States culture and politics. Various anti-abortion laws have been on the statute books of each state since at least 1900. In 1973, abortion was prohibited entirely in 30 states and legal in limited circumstances (such as pregnancies resulting from rape or incest) in 20 other states. In that year, the Supreme Court in ''Roe v. Wade'' invalidated all of these laws, and set guidelines for the availability of abortion. ''Roe'' established that the right of privacy of a woman to obtain an abortion "must be considered against important state interests in regulation."〔''Roe v. Wade'', "We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified, and must be considered against important state interests in regulation."〕 ''Roe'' established a "trimester" (i.e., 12 week) threshold of state interest in the life of the fetus corresponding to its increasing "viability" (likelihood of survival outside the uterus) over the course of a pregnancy, such that states were prohibited from banning abortion early in pregnancy but allowed to impose increasing restrictions or outright bans later in pregnancy. That decision was modified by the 1992 case ''Planned Parenthood v. Casey'', which upheld the "central holding" in ''Roe'', but replacing the trimester system with the point of fetal viability (whenever it may occur) as defining a state's right to override the woman's autonomy. ''Casey'' also lowered the legal standard to which states would be held in justifying restrictions imposed on a woman's rights. ''Roe'' had held this to be "strict scrutiny"—the traditional Supreme Court test for impositions upon fundamental Constitutional rights—whereas ''Casey'' created a new standard referring to "undue burden", specifically to balance the state's and the woman's interests in the case of abortion. Before ''Roe v. Wade'', abortion was legal in several states of the United States, but that decision imposed a uniform framework for state legislation on the subject, and established a minimal period during which abortion must be legal (under greater or lesser degrees of restriction throughout the pregnancy). That basic framework, modified in ''Casey'', remains nominally in place, although the effective availability of abortion varies significantly from state to state as many counties have no abortion providers. In the United States, the main actors in the abortion debate are most often labelled either as "pro-choice" or "pro-life", though shades of opinion exist, and most Americans are considered to be somewhere in the middle. In a Gallup.com survey of 1014 adults found that opinions on abortion in the United States remain nearly evenly split, with 46% of participants identifying as pro-life and 47% identifying as pro-choice. The poll results also indicated that Americans harbor a diverse and shifting set of opinions on the legal status of abortion in the US; the survey polled that only 28% of respondents believed abortion should be legal under any circumstances, and 48% of respondents believed that abortion should be legal under "most" or "only a few circumstances." Recent polling results also found that only 34% of Americans were satisfied with abortion laws in the United States.〔 ==Terminology== (詳細はembryo or fetus at some point in a pregnancy, and this is also how the term is used in a legal sense.〔According to the Supreme Court's decision in ''Roe v. Wade'': :"(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician. :"(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health. :"(c) For the stage subsequent to viability, the State in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother." Likewise, ''Black's Law Dictionary'' defines abortion as "knowing destruction" or "intentional expulsion or removal."〕 Another term sometimes used is that of an "elective abortion", which is used in relation to a claim to an unrestricted right of a woman to an abortion, whether or not she chooses to have one. In medical parlance, ''abortion'' can refer to miscarriage or abortion, but not after the fetus is viable. Doctors call abortions ''termination of pregnancy'' after viability. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Abortion in the United States」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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