Since many people here are interested in just the facts, ma’am, here goes:
On April 10, 1982, I was raped.
For two months afterward, I didn’t have a period. I was sure that I was pregnant, but afraid to take a pregnancy test. I was a college student who earned about $100 a week from a part-time job. Abortion was out of the question because I couldn’t afford it.
I was soooo relieved when my period returned. I know that if I was pregnant, I probably would have committed suicide if someone tried to force me to have my attacker’s child.
Did I report this crime to the police? No. This was a case of date rape, but said term didn’t exist at the time. People back then didn’t consider rape by an acquaintance to be a “real” rape. I kept my mouth shut and didn’t discuss the incident with anyone for about 3 years. In the meantime, I stopped dating, because I was so afraid of getting raped again. On March 2, 1985 , a man broke into my L.A. apartment, pointed a gun at me and told me not to scream. My first thought was, oh sh*t, I’m gonna get raped again…so naturally I screamed my head off. Fortunately, this scared the gunman ran away. This time, I reported the incident to the police.
At this point in my life, I had finished college and had a full-time job. A few weeks after the break-in, I began rape therapy, which cost me several thousand dollars over a 6-year period. It has helped quite a bit, but the memory of this incident will NEVER go away. I STILL have horrible nightmares about it.
People who claim to be “pro-life” (a misnomer, considering how many of them murder or support the murder of abortion providing doctors and their staff) usually don’t give a damn about what the pregnant rape victim goes through; they’re so caught up in fetus-worship that they’re blinded to the fact that the woman carrying said fetus is much more than just an incubator. When you are raped, you are literally ripped open. Forcing a woman to bear the child of her attacker means she will be ripped open again; it’s like being raped twice. Being raped once is bad enough, I can attest to that.
Being vehemently pro-choice, I have attended a few pro-choice rallies over the past two decades, which were always accompanied by counter-protests by rabid anti-choicers. These people are without question the most hate-filled, violent people I have ever encountered. I once saw a so-called “pro-lifer” kick a woman in the stomach simply because she was holding a sign that read “Keep Abortion Legal.” I also saw a woman get hit in the head and knocked unconscious with an unopened soda can thrown by a man who screamed, “Burn in Hell, baby killers!” I believe that a more accurate term for these people is “pro forced childbirth,” since they don’t care about women’s lives; they simply don’t want women to have control over their own bodies.
As for the Xian argument against abortion, I had the Buy Bull shoved down my throat from birth until age 18, and can state with certainty that abortion is NEVER mentioned in said book. Anti-choicers frequently refer to a passage in Exodus which mentions a miscarriage caused by men fighting, but it is NOT a description of an abortion (I also note that there are several passages in Exodus that condone slavery. Perhaps we should bring that back as well, in order to pacify the religious nuts. And did I also mention that passage in Proverbs where it says you should beat a child with a rod? Let’s make child abuse legal as well.). If their god is so “pro-life,” then why did it slaughter babies (as mentioned in Hosea)? Why did said god sanction incest (Lot and his daughters)? As far as I’m concerned, the Buy Bull is nothing more than a book of fairy tales, not facts.
Here are some more facts:
There are currently about half a million children in the foster care system in the U.S. There are over 70,000 children waiting to be adopted. Yet there are thousands of would-be parents on adoption waiting lists? Why? It seems that most of these couples want white or light-skinned babies, not older, darker-skinned minority children (nor disabled children, crack babies, etc.).
Another fact: there are over 1 million abortions performed in the U.S. each year. Suppose that all pregnant women in this country were forced to have unwanted children. There aren’t enough people to provide homes for these children; they would probably end up as wards of the state, which of course costs money, which would probably mean higher taxes for all.
Those who think it’s okay to force women to have children against their will should in turn be forced to do something against THEIR will - adopt these unwanted children, or pay for their upbringing. In addition, they should also be forced to pay for therapy for rape victims who are forced to have their attackers’ kids.
If women are once again denied the right to abortion (another fact: many people don’t know that abortion was legal until “quickening” in many U.S. states for most of the 19th century, until the Comstock law was enacted in 1873.), they will most likely resort to having illegal abortions. Upper and middle-class women will always be able to go to other countries for safe abortions; the poor will have to make do with coat hangers, knitting needles, and abortions in abandoned hotels, etc. Many women will have the unwanted babies and toss them in trash dumpsters (and we know for a fact that there’s a lot of that going on already). There will be an increase in the annual birth rate, but it sure won’t be 1 million. There will also be an increase in the death rate from illegal abortions.
As for the argument that a woman may be aborting a future scientist, etc. (this is the extremely weak “You Killed Beethoven” argument that is beloved by anti-choicers everywhere), my response is, what if Klara Poezl had had an abortion? Hitler never would have been born. Same goes for Stalin’s mon, Charles Manson’s mommy, etc. Should women feel guilty every time they have a period because the unfertilized egg that exits the body COULD HAVE BEEN someone famous??? How utterly ridiculous.
And lastly, I wonder:
Why are so many of those who call themselves “pro-life” staunch supporters of the death penalty???