Rape & Abortion: Save The Innocent Child, Help The Innocent Mother & Punish The Guilty Rapist
In America, when an innocent woman is raped and conceives an innocent child, we kill the baby. In many other cultures, they kill the rape victim. Why are innocent mothers and children being punished for the crimes of rapists? Why aren’t we saving the innocent baby, helping the innocent mother, and punishing the guilty rapist? There are waiting lists of prospective adoptive parents who will deeply love a child produced by rape. The humane solution to the violence of rape is never the violence of abortion. Nor is it the violence of “honor killings” which execute the rapist’s victim.
Consider this February 3, 2011 story in the Bangladesh newspaper The Daily Star, headlined “Raped girl whipped to death:” It says “Fourteen-year-old Hena, daughter of farmer Darbesh Kha of Chamta village in Naria upazila, was raped by her cousin Mahbub, 40, Sunday night.” Then it gets worse: “They sentenced the rapist to 200 lashes with Tk 50,000 fine and 100 lashes to the victim.: And worse yet: “The punishment for the rapist, Mahbub, was reduced from 200 to 100 lashes. But Hena could not escape punishment and lost her consciousness after 60 to 70 whippings. Her relatives took her to Naria Upazila Health Complex where she finally lost her battle for life Monday night.”
In many parts of the world, after women are savaged by rapists, they are further savaged by the authorities and their own families. Time magazine, January 18, 1999, featured a horrifying article on rape in Jordan, entitled “The Price of Honor:”
It says:
Sirhan, a 35-year-old murderer, is cheerful and relaxed and happy to tell his story. He’s especially proud to describe the efficiency with which he shot his young sister Suzanne in the head four times last March. ‘She came to the house at 8:15’ he relates, ‘and by 8:20 she was dead.’ Three days before, the 16-year-old girl had reported to police that she had been raped. ‘She committed a mistake, even if it was against her will,’ says Sirhan. ‘Anyway, it’s better to have one person die than to have the whole family die from shame.’ His is not a logic rare in the Arab world.
This, of course, is precisely the “logic” which motivates Americans to kill an equally innocent unborn child who is as much a victim of rape as his or her assaulted mother: It is better that an unborn child be killed than that its mother and her family endure the shame, emotional trauma, etc. of the rape.
Our barbaric custom is to kill the baby when a woman is raped but in many other cultures they kill the woman. Bangladesh is another example of this misogynistic perversion. The Los Angeles Times, April 18, 1991, reported that “a raped Bangladesh girl is threatened with death by male relatives … [and rape victims] are usually refused political asylum by Western nations. These are customs, they are told, not human rights violations.”
And in India, the Los Angeles Times explained in its November 26, 1992 edition, raped girls are often sold into prostitution by relatives humiliated by the girls’ violations. Raped girls become an economic burden to their families because they are viewed as “unclean” and no man is likely to find them desirable for marriage. Forced prostitution is a virtual death sentence for these innocent rape victims because more than a third of all prostitutes become HIV-positive in many Indian cities.
These are the same “economic burden” arguments often offered to justify abortion and the same notions of “uncleanness” imputed to babies conceived in rape and thereby rendered “unwanted.” But will killing a baby conceived in rape somehow “un-rape” its mother? Will the baby’s death miraculously heal her injuries? Will killing this innocent child cause her to forget the horror of her assault? Or will all the guilt and pain and injury of the rape simply be compounded by the guilt and pain and injury of the abortion? This baby is as defenseless at the hands of an abortionist as his or her mother was at the hands of her attacker.
If it’s barbaric for Jordanians to kill an innocent mother, how can it be right for Americans to kill her equally blameless baby; a baby whose life is being taken for all the same vacuous reasons? Shouldn’t we love them both? The prospective adoptive parents who are desperate to take this child into their family certainly would.