"What about rape, incest, and teenage pregnancy?"
On Abortion
Oftentimes, the pro-abortion side of the debate will point to instances of rape, incest, and teen pregnancy, saying that abortions should be allowable because of these cases. This line of debate is based upon the exception rather than the rule, and there feels to be a degree of insensitivity present when using such tragedies as justification for an argument.
However, it must be considered that maybe 1% of aborted pregnancies are provoked by rape, and less than 0.5% are in response to incest. [And these are the larger estimates! A later survey suggested that 0.3% were due to rape, and 0.03% were due to incest.] Even if exceptions were made for these two circumstances, more than 98% of current abortions would still be banned.
There is often the claim that "Not all sexual assaults are reported!" and so the data may be skewed. But even the Guttmacher Institute has not been able to produce numbers greater than 1% due to rape. So let's fill in these gaps for them. If we generously suppose that 2/3 sexual assaults go unreported, and then suppose that the severity of these sexual assaults are proportionate to the reported 1/3, then our number of abortions due to rape expands to 3%. Which, again, though still very serious, is still a small proportion of abortions.
Let it be stated that rape and incest are wrong – nobody disagrees with this. Rape, in particular, is horrific. It can leave life-long scars. Perpetrators of such an act should face severe penalties. It is important that abortion-opposers maintain empathy in this area of discussion, as people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. It is always important to be sensitive when discussing abortion, but especially here.
But back to the task at hand. Does rape or incest make abortion permissible? Well, it doesn’t seem so. Killing your offspring isn’t going to mend your trauma. Abortion will not un-rape a rape victim. Upon having an abortion, will the victim suddenly forget that she has been raped? Of course not! In such a sense, the child is hardly more of a reminder than the event itself.
Does such a child, conceived into this situation by no fault of their own, deserve the death penalty? Such a punishment isn’t even dealt to the rapist! If the guilty doesn’t even face execution, why should the innocent? Suppose a man commits a crime against his town and his son grows to look like him. Despite being reminded of the crime upon seeing the boy, the townspeople are not justified in attacking him, for he himself has done nothing wrong. If anything, the boy (and the preborn child) are also victims of the criminals’ actions. Rape is a crime. Being conceived is not. A child of rape is no less valuable than a child of consent.
Both abortion and rape similarly feature a vulnerable party being attacked by a stronger party. Justifiably, one might say that the death of a child at the hand of one’s own parent is just as morally depraved as rape.
Lianna Rebolledo was kidnapped and raped at 12-years-old, and she refused to have an abortion. In an interview with Lilia Rose, she says that it was not the baby who was to blame, but the rapist. The baby had nothing to do with the crime. She struggled with PTSD, but her baby comforted her and gave her strength.
In reality, most rape survivors choose life for their baby and many regret the abortions they have. 73% of pregnant rape victims chose life. 64% raised their children, and 36% placed their babies for adoption. These women showed improvements in positive traits and decreases in negative ones, indicating that they were healing and adjusting. This completely counters the idea that keeping the baby would result in further distress.
Regarding teenage pregnancy, it should be noted that, in 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that most women who get an abortion are in their twenties. In fact, most women who get abortions are above the age of 25, 60% have already had at least one child, and about 80% are unmarried. Less than 10% of women who get abortions are under 19 years old. Supposing no rape or incest victim was under 19, exceptions made for rape, incest, and teen pregnancy would still result in an abortion reduction of at least 82%. Women ages 18-24 are also more likely to choose less reliable contraception – such as oral contraception and condoms. While their desire to not become pregnant can be implied by use of contraception, the rate of unintended pregnancies suggests incorrect or inconsistent contraceptive practices.
Some will argue that if a teenager cannot adopt a child, how can she be forced to give birth to a child? But the response is similarly concerned with maturity: if a teenager is not ready for a child, then she is not ready for sex – and certainly, she is not ready to take a life. How can she be old enough to kill it but not old enough to care for it?
In fact, the care need not extend for too long. A mother not willing to care for her child need not raise her child beyond that window of time in which no one else can care for it. But during that window, there is a responsibility to care for that child’s needs. Imagine you were kidnapped. You wake up in a locked cabin alongside a newborn baby of no relation to you. There’s no means of escape, but in the cabin, there is everything you might need to care for the baby. It takes no great deed for you to support this child and meet its basic needs. And when you’re finally freed from the cabin, you don’t have to go on and raise the child. You are obliged to meet its ordinary needs (being the only one who could do so at the time), but you are not obliged to meet its extraordinary needs. Likewise, a pregnant woman is not obliged to raise her child, but she is obliged to meet its ordinary needs – such as supplying her uterus and feeding and clothing the child until suitable carers are found (i.e., adoption).
For many women, abortion simply means having the ability to murder their child so that they can have fun in their twenties and/or pursue their career goals. This is what the abortion-opposer means when they say that abortion is used as a form of birth control. It is motivated by textbook convenience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQKZsfy_YdM&ab_channel=PintsWithAquinas <- Special thanks to this source featuring Stephanie Gray: Highly recommend!
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cytz6LoxVaY/ 11-year-old raped and had a daughter.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CxbK8E2R7sn/ Lianna Rebolledo