Research Paper Topic Ideas

Research Paper Topic Ideas

There are many interesting research paper topic ideas.? For example, you may write about the life of Barack Obama or explore the history of abortion debate.? Our research paper guide is absolutely free to use. You will find wealth of free topics, research paper samples, and detailed writing tips. Below is a short sample research paper on morality of abortion. If you need individual help with writing, you should order custom research paper writing help at our site. Our research paper writers can handle any topic!

Research Paper Topic Ideas: Philosophy

As men began to examine their behavior and develop moral and philosophical concepts of interaction, the problem of whether to sanction abortion became an important one, particularly at a time when there was no really effective contraception. Aristotle turned his attention to the subject and wrote that abortion should be available to parents with a sufficient number of children. Plato recommended mandatory abortions for pregnant women who were over forty or who were the victims of incest. In early Greece and Rome the fetus was considered to be "a fruit that was part of a tree till it ripened and fell," and presumably it was all right to pick the unripe fruit.

With the development of the Jewish and Christian religions, abortion continued under moral scrutiny. The need for limiting the size of one's family coupled with the medical inability to achieve a practical method of doing this, except abstaining completely, made the problem of abortion very early on a real one. The major question disturbing the religious thinkers was deciding when "ensoulment" took place, at which point in the nine-month period of gestation the fetus could be said to have a soul and to have become a human being who could not be destroyed. The Greek philosophers, having pondered the question, gave their views which, unfortunately for those who wished to follow such learned opinion, did not coincide. Aristotle, far from expressing sentiments of equality between the sexes, believed that the male fetus possessed a rational soul forty days after conception, while the female received her soul eighty days after conception. Until then, the embryo wasendowed with vegetative, then animal life. Plato, on the other hand, felt that human life began only at birth. St. Gregory in the fourth century A.D. said the soul was infused at conception, and in the fifth century St. Augustine said abortion was murder. But St. Thomas Aquinas thought that the soul was not infused until the embryo was formed. He wrote that no human being exists during the early period of gestation and only when the fetus had attained human shape and human organs could it have a human soul. He believed therefore that abortion during the early period should be permitted. His was the prevailing Catholic opinion for many years. Catholic law did not always oppose abortion as it does today. Catholic theology held to the view that although the developing embryo was alive, it was alive at the beginning only in the sense that plants and animals are alive.

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