Here's a post I wrote a year ago about why I'm tentatively in favor of allowing abortions in cases of rape or incest, even though I'm otherwise pro-life. I'm not sure what the prevailing view among Christians is, but it's obvious to me that pregnancies that are the result of rape or incest are fundamentally different from pregnancies that result from negligence on the part of the mother or that are simply "inconvenient". In the latter cases the mother bears most of the responsibility for creating the baby inside her, but in the former she does not.
Three awful things that go terribly together. Regarding my tolerance of legal abortion in cases of rape and incest, Paul Hsieh from GeekPress asks the question some other readers brought up as well:
If you don't mind me putting you on the spot, I'm wondering how the rape-and-incest exception fits in with the rest of your views on the fetus being a human life worthy of legal protection.I understand those pro-choicers who don't view the fetus as worthy of legal protection and hence allow unrestricted abortion through the end of 2nd trimester.
I understand those pro-lifers who view the fetus as worthy of legal protection, and would therefore forbid all abortions.
But I've never understood the position (which I know that some conservatives take) which would ban abortions except in the case of rape/incest. (For the sake of discussion, assuming that the fetus is healthy and would grow up to be a fully functioning adult). Is there something about the way the fetus was conceived that makes it murder to abort if the mother was not raped, but makes it not murder if the mother were raped? After all, the fetus is equally human and equally innocent (or equally not human/innocent depending on one's ideology) in both cases.
Good question. First off, many pro-lifers wouldn't make the exception, and I'm not sure if my position is in the majority or not. That said, the reason I would tolerate the abortion of healthy babies conceived through rape or incest is that unlike in the vast majority of pregnancies, in such cases the mother bears no responsibility for the conception. Whenever sex is voluntary there is a chance of pregnancy, no matter how remote, and by making the decision to have sex a woman is implicitly accepting the responsibility of handling whatever consequences may result; it isn't morally acceptable to kill another human being to spare yourself inconvenience brought about by your own actions. However, in cases of rape or incest where the woman does not consent, she does not bear any responsibility for the pregnancy and should not be legally required to carry the baby to term.
An imperfect analogy is the difference between finding someone tied to a train track and actually tying someone there yourself. If you find someone tied to a track you have no legal duty to untie them before they get hit. On the other hand, if you tie someone down and they get killed then you are a murderer.
Now, this sets aside the question of moral responsibility -- but the law and morality are different matters. I think abortion should be legal in cases of rape or incest, but I don't necessarily think such abortions are desirable or morally acceptable. That's a more difficult question, and in general I think it would be best to tolerate the unasked-for inconvenience (and risk) of pregnancy in order to protect the life of the baby. However, I wouldn't force a woman to make that decision.
Update 041220 6:36pm
Many people don't get it. Forcing a hypothetical raped woman to carry her baby to term is akin to the police arbitrarily taking your wallet and giving it to the nearest homeless guy. You aren't responsible for him; if you choose to give him charity it may be noble, but society has no business forcing you to do so. In the case of the raped woman, society can't even do much to share the burden of the painful, traumatic, and difficult service she must render -- there is no one else capable of bearing her child but her, whereas the general populace can be taxed collectively to help a homeless man, thus reducing the burden on any specific person.
Is it morally right to help homeless people? Yes. Should you be forced at gunpoint to help homeless people? No. Is it morally right for a mother to carry to term a baby conceived through rape or incest? Yes. Should she be forced to do so at gunpoint? No. (And all laws are essentially coercive threats to enforce compliance with deadly force.)
Phyllis Schlafly, one of the few people with whom I disagree on principle with pretty much anything she says (if she said the sky was blue, I'd check), once said something to the effect that she didn't see why a rapist should be punished by having his child aborted in such a case. That brutal siding with the bad guy attitude had a large influence on my feelings on the subject of abortion.
If you find someone tied to a track you have no legal duty to untie them before they get hit.
Actually, I think this might fall under the category of not preventing a crime, and in some states, that is a crime in and of itself. So you may not be entirely correct in this assumption.
Mike-
Since you bring it up again, I'll ask again:
What is your biblical basis for terminating the pregnancy?
I won't expect an answer soon...I know you've got other things on your mind this week. (wink-wink!)
Aren't there Good Samaritan laws on the books in some states that require just that, that legally you must render aid in some capacity to someone in need?
Also, change the analogy from a guy tied to a railroad track to a baby left on your doorstep. If one evening you hear a noise outside, open the door and see a baby lying there in a little basket all alone, should you be legally responsible bring it in and either care for it yourself or call the authorities? Obviously, you would be morally required to.
What's the difference between caring for an abandoned baby and a guy on a railroad track?
What's the difference between caring for an abandoned baby and your own fetus?
Barry, there might be such laws, but IIRC "Good Samaritan" laws usually shield you from lawsuits if you do help someone out. The idea being, you try to do CPR on someone who's having a heart attack, and he dies anyway, and his wife sues you.
Morally, it is unacceptable for crime-victim Smith, who was victimized by criminal Jones, to inflict harm on innocent bystander Davis with his own victimization as his excuse.
Either the developing baby is an innocent bystander with a right to life, or he's not. If he is, the mere fact that his father was a rapist cannot possibly be construed as a reason to take away his own right to life -- unless we've resuscitated the notion of guilt by association.
There are lots of unexplored rationales here. One is the Sins of the Father. That being that a child concieved from an act of evil can be punished that that evil. That isn't such a far fetched rationale, and it is one you can support biblically. (God himself condemned Cain's entire lineage.)
Another is the rationale that there is a duty to mitigate the harm done to the victim. Rape is evil; the reasoning would be that to force a woman to carry the fruit of that evil would be to condemn the victim to a lifetime of punishment and reminder of that crime needlessly.
(I don't subscribe to either of these -- I think that abortion is a sin, but I don't want it criminalized. I think it is a sin because of the comandment to go forth and be fruitful, not because I think that a fetus is a person, and therefore have no problem with abortions for rape or incest.)
No one else has said it, so I guess I will: Rick, I think you are lying about Phylis Schafley. As the Bill Bennet incident has shown us all over again, leftists are just too willing to lie and distort what people actually said.
Mark, I like to use this analogy: If you cause a car accident and the other person is paralized for life, the law should force you to care for that person because you are responsible. But if you are in a similar accident where it wasn't your fault, then the law should not force you to care for the paralized person because it is not your responsibility. In both cases, there is a paralized person that needs care, the issue is whether it is right to force someone to care for them.
It is similar for pregnancy. Carrying a child to term is a genuine burden, both physically and emotionally. Should the law force someone to take on such a burden just because no one else can do it?
This is troublesome because we have a conflict of morality. Yes, it is immoral for a woman to abort her baby, no matter how she got pregnant. But it is also immoral to force obligations on others when they are not responsible for the situation.
I'm curious: have any of y'all been pregnant? No, you don't need to have been pregnant to participate in this debate, I'm just wondering if y'all know the extent of the burden of pregnancy... and what it feels like to have something else living inside of you.
Here's part of the problem, and what the problem with abortion is right now -- you're assuming that carrying the baby to term would be more traumatic to the woman than aborting it. You might want to think about this assumption. There are real medical repercussions to abortion, such as difficulties with subsequent pregnancies -- and then there are mental and emotional problems.
So, you say, okay. A raped woman doesn't have to get an abortion if she doesn't want to. But it's not that simple. They're very vulnerable, and you've got to realize that the message society is sending, overwhelmingly, is you =must= get the abortion. It will fix everything. Not realizing it's much more likely to make matters worse. The child being killed is not just a bit of the rapist, but it's also a part of the mother -- and much more a part of the mother than the rapist.
This is why Feminists for Life say "Women deserve better than abortion", and that goes for raped women as well as women who just "made a mistake". The very first feminists realized how abortion made women even more the victims of men, and it might benefit society if people understood how abortion harms women.
As you say, this is a matter of culture and morality, but the laws we have on hand signal what society values. Considering that tattoo parlors are more regulated than abortion clinics, I think we've signalled exactly where pregnant women stand in the value continuum.
After reading this page and the comments that are on here, I find myself wondering if anyone really knows what they are talking about...excluding the author of this page. I would like to pose the question...have any of you ever been raped and have gotten pregnant by the act of the rape? If you had, then you would realize how vulnerable you are and that knowing that you have the "seed" of the monster that raped you in your body and you would want to get rid of it as soon as possible. Dig deep and find your sensitive side so that you can possibly begin to imagine how horrible knowing that you are having a child that you do not want nor did you give the consent to make.
People seem so bent on doing what the bible says to do, but in fact is the bible not just a series of stories that teach what is right and what is wrong? I will admit that I do not have the bible memorized, but is there really a part of the bible that says that abortion is all cases is wrong? And I am not talking about using the Ten Commandments. I want an actual quote from the bible that says that abortion is wrong is all cases.
I, like the author of this page, consider myself between the issues. I am actually writing a paper right now on abortion; my thesis being that abortion is wrong in pregnancies that arise from consenting sex but that there are cases, such as rape, incest, health of the mother, and health of the fetus, where an abortion is okay and even warranted. Like the author has said, everytime a woman has sex, she is accepting the possibility that she can and might get pregnant. It is time for the women, and the men, of this society to accept the consequences for their actions and to stop using abortion as a "easy" way out of a situation that they willingly put themselves into. If you are not ready to have a child, then please for goodness sake, don't have sex...it really is that simple. If it is physically impossible (meaning that you don't have enough self control) to not have sex, then please use birth control properly and use at least two forms together at the same time. These are common sense things that most people just like to over-look and not admit to because they are too into what the bible says or what society says. Stop caring and use the brain that God gave you and stop blaming your fate on everyone else but yourself.