Abortion in the context of "Family planning"

Ethics is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. Also called moral philosophy, it investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. Its main branches include normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics.

Normative ethics aims to find general principles that govern how people should act. Applied ethics examines concrete ethical problems in real-life situations, such as abortion, treatment of animals, and business practices. Metaethics explores the underlying assumptions and concepts of ethics. It asks whether there are objective moral facts, how moral knowledge is possible, and how moral judgments motivate people. Influential normative theories are consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. According to consequentialists, an act is right if it leads to the best consequences. Deontologists focus on acts themselves, saying that they must adhere to duties, like telling the truth and keeping promises. Virtue ethics sees the manifestation of virtues, like courage and compassion, as the fundamental principle of morality.

The right to life is the belief that a human (or other animal) has the right to live and, in particular, should not be killed by another entity. The concept of a right to life arises in debates on issues including: capital punishment, with some people seeing it as immoral; abortion, with some considering the killing of a human embryo or fetus immoral; euthanasia, in which the decision to end one's life outside of natural means is seen as incorrect; meat production and consumption, in which the breeding and killing of animals for their meat is seen by some people as an infringement on their rights; and in killings by law enforcement, which are seen by some as an infringement on those persons' right to live. However, individuals may disagree in which of these areas the principle of a right to life might apply.

Normative ethics is the study of ethical behaviour and is the branch of philosophical ethics that investigates questions regarding how one ought to act, in a moral sense.

Normative ethics is distinct from metaethics in that normative ethics examines standards for the rightness and wrongness of actions, whereas meta-ethics studies the meaning of moral language and the metaphysics of moral facts. Likewise, normative ethics is distinct from applied ethics in that normative ethics is more concerned with "who ought one be" rather than the ethics of a specific issue (e.g. if, or when, abortion is acceptable). Normative ethics is also distinct from descriptive ethics, as descriptive ethics is an empirical investigation of people's moral beliefs. In this context normative ethics is sometimes called prescriptive (as opposed to descriptive) ethics. However, on certain versions of the view of moral realism, moral facts are both descriptive and prescriptive at the same time.

Some professionals and universities consider social policy a subset of public policy, while other practitioners characterize social policy and public policy to be two separate, competing approaches for the same public interest (similar to MD and DO in healthcare), with social policy deemed more holistic than public policy. Whichever of these persuasions a university adheres to, social policy begins with the study of the welfare state and social services. It consists of guidelines, principles, legislation and associated activities that affect the living conditions conducive to human welfare, such as a person's quality of life. The Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics defines social policy as "an interdisciplinary and applied subject concerned with the analysis of societies' responses to social need", which seeks to foster in its students a capacity to understand theory and evidence drawn from a wide range of social science disciplines, including economics, sociology, psychology, geography, history, law, philosophy and political science. The Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard University describes social policy as "public policy and practice in the areas of health care, human services, criminal justice, inequality, education, and labor". Social policy might also be described as actions that affect the well-being of members of a society through shaping the distribution of and access to goods and resources in that society. Social policy often deals with wicked problems.

The discussion of 'social policy' in the United States and Canada can also apply to governmental policy on social issues such as tackling racism, LGBT issues (such as same-sex marriage) and the legal status of abortion, guns, euthanasia, recreational drugs and prostitution. In other countries, these issues would be classified under health policy and domestic policy.

Pregnancy is the time during which one or more offspring gestates inside a woman's uterus. A multiple pregnancy involves more than one offspring, such as with twins.

Conception usually occurs following vaginal intercourse, but can also occur through assisted reproductive technology procedures. A pregnancy may end in a live birth, a miscarriage, an induced abortion, or a stillbirth. Childbirth typically occurs around 40 weeks from the start of the last menstrual period (LMP), a span known as the gestational age; this is just over nine months. Counting by fertilization age, the length is about 38 weeks. Implantation occurs on average 8–9 days after fertilization. An embryo is the term for the developing offspring during the first seven weeks following implantation (i.e. ten weeks' gestational age), after which the term fetus is used until the birth of a baby.