What about the women who are raped, and the children victims of incest?
Do you believe in blaming -- and killing-- the victims of rape/incest? Neither do I. Therefore I can't justify killing the woman (as, I understand, often happens under Shari'a law) and I can't justify killing the baby, either.
The baby, like his mother, is a victim, too, who paradoxically has the gift of life but also has been victimized by being brought into existence in a shameful and degrading way, untimely, unprepared-for and unsupported.
Having a baby in your womb as a result of a felony is like having an innocent hostage brought into you house by a terrorist. Even after you get rid of the terrorist, you find the hostage is still there. May you get a knife and slit his throat?? No. May you evict him if he's in such medical condition as immediate eviction would cause his death? No. Basically, you'd be obliged to treat the hostage humanely until the EMT's can come and take him to the ER.
Even if that works as an analogy, we need to take some time thinking about the real-life situations. So I want to add this:
In real life, only about 1% of abortions are performed for rape. There are two main reasons for this: (1) surprisingly, a majority of sexual assaults do not involve a normal, completed act of intercourse with ejaculation of semen into the vagina. (2) rape causes rage, fear, or both in the woman; and rage/fear trigger a flood of adrenaline, which --- if she was nearing her fertile time --- will block ovulation.
Nevertheless, if you're one of that unlucky 1%, pregnancy looks 100% wretched, and could certainly feel like an extension of the bodily invasion of rape. I have a close friend who performed a number of abortions at Bronx Pediatric Hospital in the 1970's as part of a medical research project. She did follow-up witht her patients (all under-age--- hence, "pediatric" -- and all the victims of at east statutory rape or incest) to document the "therapeutic" value of the abortions.
What she found deeply disturbed her. The hoped-for therapeutic effects weren't there. What she found was that the girls tended to identify with the rejected baby:
But underage pregnant girls who go on to give birth are much more likely to be removed into a protective environment (group home, etc.) and to receive health care and counseling during 9 months of pregnancy and beyond, which results in better psychological outcomes for the girls.
What I want to suggest here is that abortion is no boon for girls and women who have suffered rape or incest. It is not therapeutic. It is one more destructive, ugly experience. It is not part of the solution. It becomes part of the problem.
did you read #62?
I think you shot off your mouth before reading the thread. See #62.
Aside from that, you bring some fascinating insight to the discussion. I doubt many of these girls speak of the "evacuation" of the product of conception" (POC).
I'd like to add to that this quote from Michael Bauman:
We hide the fetal holocaust that surrounds us every day just as effectively as the Nazis hid their extermination of the Jews. And we do it the same way. We cannot bring ourselves to utter the "M" word, though we commit the "M" act. That is, we do not murder unborn children, we "abort fetusus"... Some of the more squeamish among us are unable even to say the "A" word. Though by aborting fetuses rather than murdering babies our linguistic sleight of hand has hidden the real nature of our action (murder) and the real identity of our victim (baby), some people require a still heavier dose of verbal opium. We must tell them they are merely "terminating a pregnancy," which eliminates overt reference to any living thing. . . . If "terminating pregnancies" is still to overt a verbal description because the word pregnant tends to evoke unfortunate images of happy women large with child, we can hide the crime behind an even more impersonal wall of words. We can say that the murdering of unborn children is nothing more than the voluntary extraction of the "product of conception", or, as nearly all abortion clinics have it, "removing the POC." What could be more innocent.
(Bauman, Michael. "The Euphemisms of Abortion Hide the Crime," Orange County Register 9 January 1989, reprinted in Francis J. Beckwith, Politically Correct Death: Answering the Arguments for Abortion Rights (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1993), p181.)