In that case, I can picture the script for an unfalsifiable police report:
“Around a month and half or two months ago, I forget the exact date, I went to a bar though I forget which one. I must have blacked out or been roofied or something, because I woke up hours later in a strange apartment. My clothing was disarrayed and I felt sore, but I didn’t know what happened, all I wanted to do was get home, so I took a cab home and took a long shower. I threw away the clothes I was wearing. I didn’t know what had happened and I still don’t know, but three weeks later I missed my period, waited a while for it, then took a pregnancy test. I haven’t had consenting sex with anyone for at least two months. So I must have been raped.”
Is this story plausible, i.e. does this sort of thing actually happen to women? I think yes.
Can this account be investigated? Without a specific timing or location or any DNA evidence, I’m not sure how.
So if a woman’s police reports reads like the above, how would anyone prove it was either true or false? Check taxi records from six weeks back? Show her picture around all the city bars? Run a blood test on her to look for rohypnol use?
How do they tell now? The offense already exists. If it’s not completely meaningless, then there’s a way for the police to figure it out, whether it involves permission to abort or whether that angle is absent.
The point is the police aren’t going to able to tell the difference between a woman who was actually roofied and raped and one who says she might have been roofied and raped. They can arbitrarily guess, I suppose, the net effect being that some women who were roofied and raped are disbelieved and forced to carry their rapist’s child to term.
Or you could eliminate this step and let the woman proceed directly to the clinic. She can decide on her own if she wants to file a rape report then or later.
“…so long as there is no detriment to another sentient person”. That right there is the key. A fetus, past a fairly early point of development, is definitely sentient. Is it a person? Well, now, that’s trickier: First, give us a definition of “person”, and then keep in mind that others might use a different definition. If a fetus is a person, well then surely the state does have an interest in protecting it.
Most women who have been raped go to the hospital, where they are offered the morning after pill. Even women who don’t go to the hospital because they aren’t quite sure what just happened to them, know they had unprotected intercourse, and know to get a morning after pill.
Women who don’t get one, or choose not to take one that is offered, are generally going to be women who are opposed to both contraception and abortion, so there’s no “problem”-- or at any rate, so conflict.
Women who are going to become accidentally pregnant from non-consensual intercourse, and fail for whatever reason to obtain a morning after pill, or actually not be able to obtain one are teenagers, and these are the women who are going to find a pregnancy the most isolating and burdensome.
But, the point remains that this is really a non-starter. Few women would actually avail themselves of this exemption, and few of the ones who did would actually be eligible for it. It’s a way of appearing to compromise without actually doing so.
I am not at all suggesting that the police should have the discretion to approve or deny her her abortion based on whether or not they believe her. I’m suggesting that if she requests permission to abort because she says a crime was perpetrated on her, then we should see if she reported the crime to the proper authorities, because that’s consistent with what a crime victim does.
Every person believes a fetus has all the rights of a birthed child or not.
‘Rape or incest’ is an olive branch the pro-life extend to make their message more palatable to undecideds. It is logically untenable and they know and accept it. Less dead babies is what they’re after, they’d rather make it all illegal so even fewer abortions happen.
Don’t bother them with sex education or free condoms. That’s sinner talk.
Stats on crime reporting rates strongly suggest otherwise, especially for rape. The typical rape victim DOESN’T report it, though I suppose some might if it was necessary for them to arrange an abortion.
Yet similar percentages of men and women hold pro- and anti-abortion views… :rolleyes::dubious:
I agree opposing birth control is silly and untenable, but that just shows the need for a pro-life left that will divorce opposition to abortion from the obsessive market fetishism.
All the better, then, if the desire for abortion causes rapes to be reported more and the police get information that helps them remove more criminals from the street.
My daughter is a nurse in an ob-gyn practice that occasionally does abortions.
They recently aborted a pregnancy for a 15 year old girl whose pregnancy was the result of incest. It was billed to Medicaid. There was a pile of paperwork to substantiate the incest, and a social worker interviewed the patient at length.
In practice it would be awful unless the woman can make the statement in a way that exempts any prosecution. Lots of false accusations so she can get a abortion, many men put in jail, many women also sentenced for false claims and then unlawful abortions.
But you are. Either the police investigate and determine the veracity of the claim, or you can just claim rape whether it really happened or not. The latter means that there is no actual restriction, and everyone will claim rape.
:smack: You know way too little about the subject to be saying anything. No, reporting more rapes doesn’t get more rapists off the streets. They mostly don’t report because they won’t be convicted. And the number of false claims will go up. And you said you don’t want the police to be able to stop them, so there’s no reason not to falsely report.
This is the whole point. The entire concept is untenable. It also doesn’t fit any actual moral claim about the subject unless you’re trying to punish the woman for having sex. Either the fetus has a right to life or it doesn’t.
Currentlyonly 29% of americans believe that abortion should always be legal. At the currenttime 8% of Americans think birth control is morally acceptable.
So if everyone who thinks birth control is immoral also believe that it should be illegal and if everyone who think birth control is immoral also wants legal restrictions on birth control, (Both of which are highly dubious) then those who want abortions restricted and birth control restricted still only make up 11% of those who want to restrict abortions.
Given these numbers it is clear that the vast majority of opposition to abortion is about abortion and not consequence free sex.
There’s a massive backlog in investigating rapes and sexual assaults already (Google “SAE kit backlog”) so I can’t share your confidence that requiring more rape victims to report will help.
Now, if you want to combine a mandatory-reporting requirement with a significant increase in funding to law enforcement specifically for rape and sexual assaults, then maybe more criminals could be taken off streets, though you could do that with just the latter and leave alone women who’ve already been traumatized.
If satisfying a rape exception MUST be done, let the woman have the option of just checking a box on a medical-history form, which will go into her confidential records.
Did you read my OP? I specifically set up a situation where prosecution would be difficult and extreme retaliation very easy by the perpetrator. Someone coerced into sex because of an implied threat to their career will have a very hard time proving it, and making a formal accusation can trigger the career torpedoing and force her to defend in a lawsuit against libel.
And the ‘she should want the criminal arrested and punished’ is a breathtakingly ignorant statement, because it ignores that in many cases (especially cases with no physical evidence of force against a rich, white attacker) reporting a rape has extremely low odds of resulting in ‘criminal arrested and punished’, and extremely high odds of the woman being abused by the police department, prosecutor, and defense lawyers. If the attacker is likely to get away unscathed or serve a token three month jail sentence, and the attempt at getting justice is likely to do more damage than the initial crime, then in many cases she would want to just put the trauma behind her instead of dragging it out in a useless, painful process.
Police investigations and especially prosecutions typically take longer than three months to conclude, AS I MENTIONED IN THE OP, so talking about requiring such an investigation is a non-answer. Either the woman can simply get the abortion before the investigation completes, or the ‘rape’ exception doesn’t actually exist. Big cities often have rape kits sitting around unprocessed for YEARS, and that’s just cases where there is actual physical evidence as opposed to ‘he said, she said’ testimony.