It’s Her Baby!
 
       U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin’s remark about women rarely becoming pregnant from “legitimate” rape – suggesting that if a woman is pregnant, it must not have really been a rape – was rightly decried as insensitive, and he admitted it was. Yet advocating that rape is an extreme under which abortion should be “allowed,” as if it were desirable, has this effect on victims pregnant from rape: if they choose to give birth to the baby, many will have to face acquaintances who think that making that choice means it couldn’t have really been a rape.
        Much of the rhetoric we have seen again this last week around this issue is about demanding acknowledgment that it’s not fair for her to have to bear a rapist’s child. Of course it's unfair; that’s one of a long list of reasons that rape is illegal and intolerable. But this is putting the issue in patriarchal terms. The rapist’s baby? Isn’t she’s entitled to be regarded as the mother of her own child?
        Shauna Prewitt has written an excellent law review article on legal aspects of these points.
        The idea of feticide being “allowed” in extreme cases is based on the premise that even if violence is a bad idea for lesser reasons, it still solves problems in extreme cases. Violence hurts everyone. Healing requires compassion from everyone – and the ready availability of abortion shouldn’t be an excuse for cold-heartedness by those who want to pretend that the problem has been fixed.
 

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People Conceived in Rape
 
        Who would be willing to look into the eyes of a woman and say, “I know you were conceived in a rape, and therefore, your life has less value than other people’s lives?” Rebecca Kiessling, an attorney and international speaker, is one such woman, and she does a great deal of educating on this point. She has offered a good response on how to address the issue well, rather than in the way Akin did.
 

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Abortion after Rape and the Death Penalty
 
        William Saletan, columnist for Slate, had an interesting take on the story of abortion after rape. He checked responses on the General Social Survey, which covers U.S. opinion on many topics with large numbers of people. He took responses on support for abortion because of low income as a start, and looked at rises of support for abortion due to rape. He cross-tabulated this with measures of harsh attitudes to crime, showing that those with harsher views were more likely to approve of abortion after the crime of rape:  
        “Even the death-penalty crosstab showed a similar gap. Here, you’d expect an anti-abortion boost from pro-lifers who oppose all killing. Indeed, in the low-income scenario, death-penalty foes opposed legal abortion more than death-penalty supporters did, by about five points. But when the scenario changed to rape—a shift that’s logically irrelevant from a purely pro-life point of view—the spread increased. While support for legal abortion jumped by 31 points among death-penalty opponents, it jumped by 36 points among death-penalty supporters.”
 

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Quotation of the Week
Rebecca Kiessling,
“Woman Conceived in Rape Responds to Akin Abortion Controversy”
LifeNews, August 20, 2012
 
       “The Supreme Court has said that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment for rapists and that rapists don’t deserve the death penalty. I don’t think the innocent child conceived in rape deserves the death penalty for the crimes of her father. It seems to me that is cruel and unusual punishment.”