Raped women who had their babies say that anyone who is been in the pro-life movement for a while has been confronted with the argument, “Shouldn’t abortion be legal in cases where the woman has been raped?”
Even though, according to Planned Parenthood’s own statistics, less than 1% of all abortions are committed on women who were raped or were victims of incest, pro-choice activists insist that abortion must be legal for these women, even if it leads to thousands of women a year having abortions for other reasons.
In fact, Roe v. Wade was based on the rape argument– Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff Jane Roe, claimed that she had been gang-raped and needed an abortion. Years later, she admitted that the rape story was false and was made up in order to garner sympathy for the pro-choice cause.
Pro-choicers have been very successful in convincing the general public that rape victims need abortions. Implied is the belief that women who are pregnant by rape cannot possibly want their children, that they could never be happy giving birth, and that it is completely unnatural for a woman to want to have a rapist’s baby.
When pro-choice activists argue that abortion must be legal in cases of rape, there is always one thing missing from their rhetoric – the voices of women who were raped and kept their babies. These are the people whom the pro-life and pro-choice movements should be listening to. These are the people who are intimately acquainted with the emotional trauma of rape and the horror of a pregnancy resulting from rape. And what they’re saying may surprise you.
Kathleen DeZeeuw, the mother of a child conceived in rape, spoke out against pro-choicers who were making the argument that abortion must be legal in cases of rape:
I, having lived through rape, and also having raised a child ‘conceived in rape’, feel personally assaulted and insulted every time I hear that abortion should be legal because of rape and incest. I feel that we’re being used to further the abortion issue, even though we’ve not been asked to tell our side of the story. (1)
How should people respond to a woman who has been raped and is considering abortion? DeZeeuw says:
As I stated before, a woman is most vulnerable at a time such as this, and doesn’t need to be pounced on by yet another act of violence. She needs someone to truly listen to her, care for her, and give her time to heal. (2)
DeZeeuw claims that many times, rape victims are pressured into having abortions by those around them. People are often very uncomfortable around a rape victim. They don’t know how to deal with her trauma, they don’t know how to comfort her, and many times they wish the problem would just go away, that she would “get over” it. These feelings are exacerbated when the rape victim is pregnant. When they say that a rape victim is constantly reminded of the assault by her pregnancy, they are actually saying that they themselves are constantly reminded of the assault by seeing her pregnant. While it is true that being pregnant after rape is very traumatic, rape victims who have kept their children often say that they wish the people around them had been more supportive.
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