I do so value your honesty on these 'tough' cases; if the vast majority of our fellow Americans were so honest and daring of heart to address these points, the largest number of abortions would be avoided and literally millions of newly conceived individual human beings would join us in citizenship. And therein is a tale, the welcoming of life, regardless of the odds stacked against a little one.
Paul Harvey did a piece on the following story; I'll try to paraphrase as best I can, from faint memory. [Feel free to add details, folks, I don't have perfect recall.] What would today's doctors advise a pregnant woman suffering with a 'sexually transmitted disease', a history of miscarriages and two less than healthy previous children, and poverty in the household with eight(?) siblings for the preborn she carries?... Kill the unfortunate unborn child, in most cases today. Is that to avoid suffering for the child, improve the family setting, or avoid responsibility for the society at large in which this 'loser' child will dwell? Beethoven's mother gave life support to him as such a child ... his odds for birth were better than a preborn of today. Sometimes I wonder whether our expectations and our loving welcome (or lack thereof) has something to do with the eventual life lived by the newly arriving children.
FTH, our society will likely step back from our current horrific reality, in stages, with large steps, hopefully. The issues you raise are very important to the step-wise reversal of our abortion on deamnd culture.
In a perfect nation, we would welcome and protect EVERY newly conceived individual human being. The case of balancing a newly conceived life with a woman's rights who has been criminally assaulted is only a difficult case because of our weak affirmation of life. We affirm the woman's plight but prefer to pass on the plight of a newly conceived individual ... though conceptions from rapes is a very small statistic, I was just so conceived, but my blessed Mother chose to affirm life when she found she was giving life support to me; as she has told me, there was never a point when she considered my life expendable after she discovered she had conceived me in her womb. Of course I didn't learn of these facts until later in life, but her affirmation made her stronger even though I wasn't the easiest child to care for.
The issue really is 'how many individual human beings are involved in any legal decision contemplated, and we ought include the unborn individual in our calculations. Sadly, our current state of law doesn't fully recognize the humanity of the preborn, though historically it was a given not even up for debate.
We are working to change things, step by painful step, to not only return to our previous affirmation, but to go beyond that historical marker now that we have so much more evidence of the individuality of the preborn.
"... I've just never been certain in certain cases like those shadow areas of rape victims ..." Realizing that law will not ban abortion in such cases as rape and perhaps incest, I would offer that we could, at the very least, state a ban for terminating newly conceived innocent individual life after the eighth week, thus changing our perspective to life support for individuals, the responsibility of which befits the society when a woman cannot continue life support beyond the birthday.
If you think about it, the concept of 'life support' is already ingrained in our law ... fathers are mandated by courts to provide life support to their children and women are required by law to provide life support for crib-bound individual humans ... and it's far easier and shorter period to provide life support for an infant in the womb than one in a crib.
I sympathize with your conflicted thoughts on these tough issues, but the best I can offer is a kind of schizophrenia, where your heart holds ALL conceived individual human life as sacred, while your mind deals with the realities of allowing some abortion because of the hardness of our collective hearts.