Posted on 08/25/2012 8:30:09 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Republican Todd Akin is standing firm. He has refused to bow to pressure to withdraw his candidacy for the U.S. Senate after he made a comment that Gary Bauer of The Campaign for Working Families called, "a gift to our political enemies."
When the Missouri Congressman was asked by a St. Louis TV station to state his views regarding possible exceptions for abortion, he responded, "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." He added: "But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something. You know I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child."
For all his good intentions of trying to put the focus on the right to life of the unborn, Akins' use of the phrase "legitimate rape," which he later called a "misstatement," and for which he apologized and asked for forgiveness, has resulted in fierce castigations from Democrats and the liberal media. It has also brought calls from his fellow Republicans to withdraw from the race against incumbent Claire McCaskill.
Ann Coulter wrote, "If Akin truly loves his country and genuinely wants Roe v. Wade overturned, he will step aside and allow another Republican to run in his place." Coulter and others have said Akin should have been better prepared to respond to the question.
"How about saying," she offered, "'Yes, it's still a life, but more people are killed in drive-by shootings in Chicago every year. You give us the 2 million abortions that aren't a result of rape and incest and we'll give you the few thousand that are.'"
Coulter was correct in pointing to the huge number of deaths every year at the hands of abortionists. But her response still misses the mark on two points.
As lawyer Rebecca Kiessling, who was herself conceived in rape, says, "Rape exceptions in the law actually put the government in the position of having to ascertain when the child was conceived, who the father is, whether the child was conceived during the alleged rape or during intercourse with her husband or boyfriend, and if the child was conceived during the time frame of the alleged rape, then the government would need to determine whether the sexual intercourse was consensual or not."
According to Kiessling, the "rape exception" only perpetuates injustice against rape victims whose accounts are viewed with skepticism. She says that "it further leaves the majority of impregnated rape victims wholly unprotected under the law. Rape exceptions suggest that a 'real rape victim' couldn't possibly love 'the rapist's baby' and that rape victim mothers don't exist."
This assumption was expressed by Susan Milligan in U.S. News and World Report. She called children conceived through rape, "spawn." Such comments deserve as stern a rebuke as Akin's do. No child is any less human because he or she was conceived during a rape. Such a claim denies the biblical truth that all children-including the unborn-are created in the image of God. The circumstances of their conception are irrelevant. The baby in the womb is an innocent human person whose inalienable right to life must be protected just as much the baby outside of the womb.
Coulter's response also overlooked the fact that abortion itself is a traumatizing experience. The truth is:
abortion hurts women. Giving a woman the abortion option-whether she is the victim of a rape or a married woman with unplanned pregnancy-is not the "compassionate answer." Abortion does not bring healing; it brings misery, pain, and suffering, as millions of women who have had abortions can attest.
After 39 years of legal abortions in America, the statistics on the effects of abortion on women are nothing short of tragic:
•65 percent of women who abort report symptoms Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that they attribute to their abortions.
•Women who abort have a 62 percent higher risk of death from all causes for at least eight years after their pregnancies.
•Suicide rates in women are 6–7 times higher after an abortion.
Supporters of the abortion industry want to hide the truth that abortion is harmful to women. Every woman considering having an abortion should be told the fact that 31percent of women who have abortions suffer health complications afterwards.
•Women who abort are twice as likely to have pre-term or post-term deliveries in subsequent pregnancies.
•Women who abort are more likely to experience infertility, stillbirths, and miscarriages.
•Women who abort have a significantly increased risk of breast cancer and cervical cancer. (See the Elliot Institute's Life-Threatening Risks of Abortion)
As Rebecca Kiessling observes, Rep. Akin is not the first political candidate to have run afoul of the media over the question, "What about rape and incest?" "The problem," she says, "is not with these candidates' values. The problem is how they express them."
Kiessling says candidates should respond to the question by giving the following three-part answer:
First, according to the Supreme Court, the death penalty is "cruel and unusual punishment" and rapists don't deserve the death penalty. However, if the rapist father doesn't deserve such punishment, how can we say that the innocent child conceived in rape deserves to die for the crimes of her father?
Second, Keissling points out, rape victims are four times more likely to die within the next year after the abortion, with a higher rate of suicide, murder, drug overdose, etc.. "If we truly care about rape victims," she says, "we should protect them from the rapist, and from the abortion, and not the baby. A baby is not the worst thing that could ever happen to a rape victim-an abortion is."
Finally, notes Kiessling, rape victims choose abortion at half the rate of the average unplanned pregnancy, which is over 50 percent. "Only 15-25 percent of rape victims choose abortion…. The majority of rape victims choose to raise her child - not 'the rapist's baby'-HER child." At her website, Rebecca has gathered stories of women who became pregnant by rape and either regret aborting, are raising their children, or are birth-moms. She also has stories of those who were conceived in rape and/or incest.
The answer to the question, "What about rape and incest?" is clear-and it's not abortion. Two wrongs do not make a right.
-- Dr. Karen Gushta is a writer and researcher for Truth in Action Ministries (formerly Coral Ridge Ministries). Her most recent book is How Can America Survive? The Coming Economic Earthquake. She has also written The War on Children: How Pop Culture and Public Schools Put Our Kids at Risk (2009) and co-authored Ten Truths About Socialism (2010). Dr. Gushta is a former board member of the Broward County Right to Life and is Vice-President of Broward County Eagle Forum. Her doctorate is in Philosophy of Education.
So, in your view, trying to STOP the wholesale slaughter of innocent Americans is "no good"?
Anthony Comstock made Margaret Sanger a celebrity. We’d have been better off if he’s left well enought alone.
So, you think social conservatives are to blame for the 53 MILLION VICTIMS of the American holocaust?
How you've remained on this site for so long will always be a mystery to me.
Those honorable rules served our country well for nearly 200 years. Then we shot ourselves in the foot in 1972.
Unless and untill we restore pro-life as a rule of law... we are rearranging deck chairs on the Titantic with regards to other issues.
My candidates are pro-life, and because they are, then we can trust their judgment on secondary issues like the economy, foreign policy and so on.
If you are wrong on fundamental issues like abortion, and if you are chicken to make a stand on this...
Then you are useless and will be defeated. Case in point... Romney and the CFA issue. Here Mitt had a golden opportunity to body slam Hussein and the libs. But he found it politically expedient to remain quiet. That disgusts me.
Well, if a woman chooses to lie about the circumstances of her pregancy, then she will have to live with the results of that lie.
The rapist should have thought about possible consequneces of his actions before he committed them. The rapist put his child at risk by his actions, that is his burden to bear.
I will never force by law a woman to bear the child of her rapist. Ever. If she chooses on her own to do that, then I will support that decision. If she chooses not to, then I will support that decision.
And as I told you before, what you want will NEVER be passed into law, it’s insane.
She never consented to having that child prior to being impregnated by a rapist.
Therefore, she will be asked for her consent after being raped, because that is the only choice the rapist gave her.
She can give it, or she can not give it, it’s up to her as it always was.
So, you didn't say that it was psychotic to not have a "rape exception"?
It is your thinking that is twisted.
Why, because I oppose killing the innocent?
Well, not everyone agrees with this forum or you. A question was asked, and I answered it. The world is not your echo chamber, even though I know you want it to be.
This is a PRO-LIFE CONSERVATIVE forum, not a debating society.
An innocent American is murdered EVERY 24 SECONDS, on issues such as this it NEEDS TO BE AN ECHO CHAMBER.
Little jeremiah, there really is no good way to solve this problem.
It’s a terrible situation, a choice I would never want to face. It is entirely the fault of the rapist for causing it.
If a woman falsely claims rape, then that is very different. She will have to live with that action. That is not something that I would support at all.
I understand fully that people conceived of rape would not rather have been killed, and as I said, if a woman chooses to have that baby, then I support her. However, I am not going to force her to do that.
If she says no, then she says no.
And as I told you before, what you want will NEVER be passed into law, it’s insane.
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We get your point. First you called us psychotic. Now we are insane.
And you - as you admitted upthread - are as your tagline says...
heartless.
Some killings are justifiable, and yes I am OK with it.
Certainly, such a decision would have to be made early on, because once a baby devolops, then I’m not going to be OK with it.
You ask me if I am a Nazi with uniform, but I ask you the same question. Where to you get off forcing a woman by law to bear the child of her rapist? I cannot support that at all.
We were originally talking about rape and incest. I think the way to stop wholesale slaughter is to stop the ones that virtually everybody can agree on as wrong (or deep down inside, knows to be wrong). This would be the convenience of the mother, boyfriend, spouse or family pressure, sex selection, and other purely elective reasons. It’s not rape and incest that are even claimed to be the causes of most of our abortions, and having Akins give the pro-aborts that meme was an incredibly self-defeating thing.
Hard cases make bad law, and the pro-aborts used rape and incest (because most people are freaked out about the possibility of these things) to sneak in the whole rest of the Sanger package.
We didn’t respond correctly at the time. We needed to make the point that people who had been through experiences like that needed the full support of society to get through it well and be encouraged not to punish the child for a horrible thing that happened to the mother...and also to receive as much help as they could in living a normal life after such a traumatic event. In addition, we needed to make it clear that many families were standing by, ready to adopt (something that has been made so difficult now by the pro-aborts that it’s almost been eliminated from the mind of the average person).
Instead, we had self-righteous people declaring all or nothing, who cares, the woman should get over it, she probably deserved it anyway, etc. I know, because I saw the very first liberalized abortion laws passed (in New York State) and I was almost embarrassed to be opposed to abortion, because the anti-abortion approach was so heavy-handed and crude that it drove people away.
The GOP (largely thanks to Paul Ryan) got one of its strongest anti-abortion planks in years this time around; it’s not absolute, but it’s as far as you can go because you need to SECURE POPULAR SUPPORT and there was a lot of RINO opposition to it. And now Akins and his ilk are already discrediting it with their stereotypically cruel and self-righteous posing, and it’s going to be all that much harder to defend it.
Thanks for nothing.
Therefore, she will be asked for her consent after being raped, because that is the only choice the rapist gave her.
She can give it, or she can not give it, it’s up to her as it always was.
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Obviously, no women consents to being raped, since the very definition of rape includes a lack of consent. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make in sentences 2 & 3. Are you saying that the only choice a woman has once she is pregnant after rape is to choose whether or not to have an abortion?
I believe that my previous post to you addressed this. The child within her is equally hers. It is a part of her, one might even say that it is more a part of her than it is of the rapist, since it is living inside her body until birth, influenced by every part of her while it grows.
Why are you so crtical of rapists anyway? What do you have against the average rapist? Hmm?
Look: The violence of abortion parallels the violence of rape. When a woman exercises her right to control her own body in total disregard of the body of another human being, it is called abortion. When a man acts out the same philosophy, it is called rape.
So. If you can justify abortion, then you can justify rape.
It’s. That. Simple.
Who's fault is that?
Excellent post.
It seems like this discussion has gone on forever. I wish I would hear a candidate just say he is totally pro-life but realizes a change in awareness is needed for the rest of the country to feel like him. More education is needed as far as when an unborn has a heartbeat, brainwaves, can feel pain, etc. The personhood legislation would be a way to go from there and it would have broad support. In the meantime repealing Obamacare will save some babies. Yes the fight goes on I just wish people would wake up so it would not be such a battle.
I cannot believe what I'm reading today. If you're so embarrassed by being a conservative, then quit pretending.
Prolife Except in the Case of Rape?
Eternal Perspective Ministries ^ | Randy Alcorn
Posted on Thursday, August 23, 2012 10:53:35 PM by Dead Dog
Yes, yes, and yes.
Thanks for the link, R2.
The choice she has after being impregnated by a rapist is to give her consent to the pregancy or to not give it.
Same as if she had been asked prior and as she should have been.
I am not going to force her consent on her. That is for her to do or not do. It isn’t for the law, or politicians, or you or anyone else but her to do.
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