Opponents of abortion rights have a long history of supporting abortion bans with three major exceptions: when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, or when a woman’s life is at risk.
But, fueled by momentum from the passage of a restrictive abortion law in Alabama, a coalition of anti-abortion-rights groups released a letter Wednesday asking Republican officials to “reconsider decades-old talking points” on exceptions to such laws.
“We understand that issues like rape and incest are difficult topics to tackle; nevertheless, it is our view that the value of human life is not determined by the circumstances of one’s conception or birth,” said a draft of the letter provided to NPR by Students for Life of America, which led the effort.
But it’s not just about “one’s” conception or birth. It’s also about the female human being in which “one” has to gestate for nine months in order to be able to have an actual human life. That female human being is already a human being with a life; she’s not a process, she’s completed. If she’s not completed she can’t possibly gestate or conceive an infant, so we know she’s completed.
If we think about it from the angle of valuing her human life first, then we grasp that the circumstances of conception do indeed determine the value of the process inside her body that depends on her before it can be a human life. If the conception is a result of rape then it is violently against her will: it is something she did not want and did not seek, and it’s something that was imposed on her forcibly by the kind of human being that is free from ever being forced to gestate an infant she never asked for.
The forced-birthers of course want us to put the life of the fetus first, with the life of the host a distant second if at all. But there’s no reason to do that. An embryo has no reason to cling to life, to want to stay inside the female body long enough to have a human life; an embryo has no plans, no ongoing life it wants to continue, no dreams, no memories, no favorite landscapes. The imagined life of the embryo should not trump the real life of the woman or girl.
The letter to McDaniel comes as Charlotte Pence, the daughter of Vice President Pence, penned an op-ed in The Washington Times expressing support for Alabama’s law. “Personally, I would not encourage a friend to get an abortion if she suffered the horrendous evil of rape or incest because I care about her child — and her. I do not believe abortion provides healing,” she writes.
But it’s not about what Charlotte Pence believes. It’s about what the woman or girl wants.
Comments
11 responses to “Let’s forced raped women to stay pregnant”
There was a tweet (or series of tweets, I think) recently by a woman who stated that if she had not had an abortion when very young, that she would never have married and had the three children that she did end up having. One never hears about what potentially could be from abortion opponents. If human life is so valuable, then surely three happy children are better than one miserable one?
They may be over playing their hand this time since this view is really out of sync with even a lot of anti-abortionists. Let’s hope so…
#1, the woman you’re referring to is the writer Ursula K. Le Guin, and here’s a excerpt of what she wrote:
And if I had not had the abortion I had, I would not today have my son, who has as much right to live – more, because he is actually a living, breathing, human being – as the ball of cells that I aborted.
If you accept the premises of the pro-life argument — which, of course, you shouldn’t — then logically it really shouldn’t matter how a fetus was conceived. But the GOP has usually allowed those kinds of exceptions because (1) they were trying to just gently push on, rather than plow right through, the legal boundaries of Roe/Casey; and (2) they know how few people are convinced, and how many are appalled, by arguments that women should be compelled to bear their rapist’s child.
Now they’ve got the Supreme Court they want, #1 is no longer a consideration. I’m not sure what’s going on with reason #2, though. I think maybe they’re just gambling that those states are so red that overreaching on abortion won’t hurt them. They may be right — Alabama almost elected a sexual predator to the Senate just to avoid even a conservative Democrat.
There is now so clearly a strategy being implemented across many states and organizations it is actually stunning. Stack the courts, load the state legislatures with test cases, and then this – all of a sudden, the ‘rape and incest’ exceptions which have been a common part of the anti-abortion discussion for at least a generation are being cast aside, seemingly against all political reason.
This is clearly an attempt to move the Overton Window on abortion rights. Bring a total and universal ban into the conversation, and suddenly substantial restrictions to the current set of rights will appear as a reasonable compromise.
J.A. @ 3: Thank you!! I knew that it was a woman whom I admired and followed, I just forgot that it was UkLG.
They missed one: when a wealthy man’s mistress becomes pregnant, the rules just magically change.
I think you’re being too generous – I don’t think they even care about the potential life half as much as they care about keeping women under control. If they did, they’d be lobbying for the rights of all of those fertilised zygotes frozen for research and in fertility clinics.
But they just don’t care about those, only the ones currently in a woman are to be forced to term.
Some do go that far.
The value of human life, clearly, depends on not being a woman or girl.
James, you’re welcome. I met with Le Guin twice myself (and read her works too, of course) and found her to be a very wise woman. Not a wise person or a wise uterus-holder, but a wise woman.