I agree and that is why I wrote legally consent, meaning that the person’s consent actually is recognized as valid according to the law.
Is “statutory” rape any different in the eyes of the law? If you have sex with your underage girlfriend, does it matter if she consents or not? To me, adding the “statutory” prefix is just a way of saying “by the letter, not the spirit” of the law, but the writing is still the same. Is “statutory rape” even a legal term, or is it just a layman phrase?
The implicit rationale for the “rape or incest” exception seems to be not that the sex involved is “sinful”, but that it is illegal. The exception is dependent on the filing of a police report alleging the offence of rape or incest.
Presumably, whatever public policy is considered to justify criminalising rape and incest is also considered to justify terminating the products of conception resulting from rape or incest.
The question is not whether it’s “valid”, whatever that means. The question is whether it’s relevant.
If the law says " it is an offence for UDS to have sex with nate", then it’s an offence. The question of whether either of us consented, or could have consented, simply doesn’t arise.
It certainly does. A 15-year old boy, say, who has sex with his 15-year old girlfriend will very quickly find out that whether she consented or not makes a very great difference to what happens to him in terms of charge and sentence.
I believe it is a legal term in some jurisdictions, where sex with an underage partner is formally categorised as a species of rape (regardless of consent), attracting the penalties appropriate to rape. In other jurisidictions it’s a distinct offence from rape, with its own suite of penalties.
What it means is that their consent would not be considered valid in a defense against an accusation of rape. It’s a pretty common way to discuss the concept, same as saying minors cannot legally consent to sex with adults.
Yes, technically there are some exceptions, as a very young adult might be young enough to have sex legally with a sufficiently older minor (e.g., with so-called Romeo-and-Juliet laws). You can also get into how what counts as a minor is different depending on what is being discussed.
But I don’t really see what any of this adds to the question in the OP. Why is all incest considered an exception for most pro-lifers? Why would it be okay to abort a baby formed from the consensual sex of two sufficiently related adults?
The OP was just trying to head off anything like saying “maybe the parent was too young to legally consent.”
Of course not! Children are a blessing! The handicapped are a special blessing! Parents need to take responsibility for the children they bring into the world, not rely on government handouts/welfare, don’t be silly! If she didn’t want kids she shouldn’t have had sex, even if it was involuntary on her part! Government healthcare is socialist and evil! Parents need to take care of their kids and if they want to “abandon” them in a group home they have to pay for it themselves! Rapists have a right to a parental relationship with the kids they fathered by rape!
:rolleyes:
Places like Alabama are abysmal when it comes to help of any sort for the disadvantaged.
Part of it is a language issue. In some languages/locations/dialects/legal systems, “incest” includes “statutory rape” as well as or even instead of “sex between close relatives”. Part of it is that sometimes sex between close relatives includes two kids so young that they don’t even understand what is it they’re doing: in their minds they’re just “playing mommies and daddies”. In any case, the idea is that these children can be aborted due to being the result of a traumatic relationship.
To me the question is why are there people who are ok with these abortions but not ok with terminating a pregnancy which will produce trauma in the future (including not being ok with terminating certain pregnancies where the fetus is not viable, so who are they trying to save?).
Out of time:
To me the question is, first, why are there people who are ok with these abortions but not ok with terminating a pregnancy which will produce trauma in the future (including not being ok with terminating certain pregnancies where the fetus is not viable, so who are they trying to save?), and second, why some pro-choice people insist so much on these particular two instances rather than talking about the medical-risk ones. Nobody seems to say “OMG, they won’t even allow an abortion when the fetus is not viable!” Is that too long? Is it too complicated, daring to bring up that sometimes a non-viable pregnancy continues far beyond when medical science can say “baby no worky”? It doesn’t even work terribly well as an example of “my body, my choice”, but maybe that’s an issue with the differences in our perception; maybe they think it’s the perfect example.
I was born in Alabama, and still live here, and for some reason I’m a liberal. I’m a straight white atheist male, my parents and extended family are all steadfast Trump supporters. I work in a male-dominated science field, and every white person I work with is conservative, every minority person I work with votes Democratic but are not liberal. As I’ve stated in the past on this message board, I’ve truly felt like I’ve been in bizarro world since the election. My wife and I keep each other sane.
Having said that, I have two special needs children. And while I can’t say that Alabama’s hand is not forced in the situation, I can’t say that the education system here has ever put in a roadblock for my kids to get all the help they need.
elating to the topic, I have to give Alabama some credit in passing an anti-abortion law with no exceptions, relative to other states that pass these kinds of laws with exceptions. Abortion is a very complicated issue for me, and while I don’t feel like it should be outlawed, I’m also not sure when an egg + sperm deserves human rights. But if it does deserve human rights at conception, it definitely should not matter how it is conceived. These attempts to exempt forced pregnancies from the anti-abortion laws just really undermine the whole argument.
It’s not just the letter, it’s also the spirit. The idea is to punish people who have sex with an underage partner, even if they consent enthusiastically, because they’re assumed to not be able to give a meaningful consent and it’s assumed that they’re likely to have been manipulated into giving consent, and it’s assumed they’re likely to be damaged by having sex with an older partner. Apparently (from a recent debate there has been in France where until recently there wasn’t properly an age of consent, even though having sex with a partner younger than 15 was a crime it wasn’t rape), the fact that it also avoid having to prove that a rape occured if if the sex wasn’t consensual is another reason.
I would say the reason to allow non-rape incest is that normally children are to be supervised when they play with other children. However when it comes to brothers and sisters it is not always possible to supervise them all the time nor is it reasonable for that to be expected, and they can and do sometimes explore their bodies. Things sometimes happen, and it can happen at a time before they understand what they are doing. Therefore you have a impossible situation, minors should not be sexual as they can’t consent and may not understand - at least legally, parents/guardians should supervise this and prevent this from happening, however male/female children are living together, thus negating the parents/guardian’s ability to supervise them all the time.
So there since there is a situation where sex between minors can be expected to happen, the act itself can not be seen as illegal, thus no rape. So you have a case where a child can be pregnant without understanding from both minors of how that came about - at least legally, so also thus no consent. Without consent one can argue that is the same reason for the rape exception except this is not rape, as rape is illegal, this is not illegal. So the exception for incest is needed.
However what happens with non-related children living together, they should also get that same exemption. I feel that the assumption that it would in general be brother/sister.
In practice I’m sure that some view this exception for adult/child sex ‘get out of jail free’ card situations too, but that would be rape.
I agree with you. I think the “incest” exclusion shows that most pro-lifers don’t really believe that all life is precious.
However, pro-lifers who argue that should be no “escape hatches” also aren’t helping their case any. We make exceptions for other forms of murder (e.g., self defense, executions via the death penalty, and “collateral damage” of military conflict) because reasonable people can agree that some murder can be justified. It is reasonable to decide that an “involuntarily” conceived fetus produced through rape is a different situation than an "involuntarily"conceived fetus produced through conceptual rape. Aborting the former is more like killing in self-defense.
That said, I think the rape exception is even more of a useless “concession”, if we call it that, than the incest one. A lot of rape is of the date rape variety, where the partners know each other and there may not be a lot of obvious signs of injury. By the time a woman can show that rape occurred beyond the shadow of reasonable doubt, her fetus will a toddler. And we all know that a married woman who claims her husband raped her will likely have a difficult time convincing law enforcement, not without sworn testimony from the husband attesting to this. So the rape exception is just a way for pro-lifers to make their bullshit seem more palatable. Anyone with an IQ higher than that of a baked potato should recognize this, but alas, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
ummmmmm
In my understanding, not only is “statutory rape” just a layman phrase, “rape” itself is a layman’s term. I say this because one of the times I got summoned for jury duty, and made it as far as the voir dire process but didn’t get empaneled, the defendant was being charged with “involuntary deviate sexual intercourse.” They didn’t really explain that, so when I got home I looked up the laws in several states, and found they all used phrases like that rather than the word “rape.” I also found that what we call statutory rape laws didn’t actually use the word “rape,” nor the word “consent” or any similar term. Instead, they just say something like “a person commits a class B felony when that person is over the age of 18 and engages in sexual intercourse with a person under the age of 16” or something like that.
But are you brother and sister?
I think that this–and the idea that children of such a union are an abomination, tainted by their origin–was certainly part of the historical rationale and this idea still lingers. It’s not about genetic weakness. It’s about the sins of the fathers (and mothers).
Those exceptions are there because the pregnancy is clearly not the “fault” of the woman, even though it isn’t the (alleged) baby’s fault either. Other pregnancies *can *be readily slut-shamed. The anti-choice position is *not *fundamentally about murder but about misogyny.
That “works” (for some values of “works”) when the exception is for rape.
As has been pointed out, it doesn’t work for a blanket exception for incest. Incest between parties both of whom are of age and consenting may be rare, but it can happen.
Strong contender for Reply of the Year. (And that was before I noticed you’d actually written something… 
)
N.B. cited post was originally in white text.
Sure, but it can’t be simply “blamed” entirely on the female party. She therefore has “permission” to have agency over her own self.
No, it doesn’t make logical sense. It isn’t about logic, but about keeping the little darlings in their places.
Neither can any pregnancy.
As you say, it’s not about logic. But the people, or some of them, who are trying to install these laws try to claim it’s about logic; because the alternative is to admit that they’re trying to impose a religious regulation on people who aren’t members of the religion(s) in question.