Rape and Why I Became Pro-Choice

Posted on February 3, 2011 in Abortion Strange Violence

Not even events in Egypt could hide the GOP attempt to redefine rape. Only broken bones and bruises would have qualified under New Jersey Representative Chris Smith’s codicil to the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, meaning that if your 13 year old had a fling with her 30 year old school teacher, she was stuck with the child. It also meant that if you doped your date first, it wasn’t rape. The bill attempt to limit abortions to “forcible rape” victims outraged women and those who loved them and caused the GOP to engage in the fastest Congressional backpedal in recent years.

At the heart of this controversy was an attempt to dismantle Choice by narrowly constricting who could have an abortion. Mind you the gap is still too narrow. Let me tell you why: Women seek abortions pretty much for one reason: the child is unwanted. Some of these women have been raped. Some of those who have been raped actually report the rape to authorities. Some of these women don’t. Some women have been intimidated into sex. They gave their consent under the law, but they weren’t happy about it. I will grant that some are habitual abortion-seekers who use it as a means of birth control. But let’s say I am running an abortion clinic. How do I distinguish between the ones who just didn’t report the rape and the ones who were intimidated into sex from those who are abortion junkies?

The answer is that I can’t. I will have to take the woman’s word for it or else hire a detective service to investigate the sex lives of each client. Why force women to lie? The fact is that before six months, miscarriages are highly unlikely to produce viable and healthy offspring. The idea that the opposite is the case is nothing but ecclesiastic fantasy.

The Republicans were trying to clear the mess that comes with saying “We will allow abortions only in the case of rape”. And this past week, they showed what a mud hole that leads us into. In a time when we should be cutting back bureaucracy, they are openly inviting the creation of more, draconian bureaucracy. Bureaucracy that doesn’t serve to protect those walking around, but to bind them, to effectively turn women into livestock.

I used to be anti-abortion and, in many respects, I still am. I would rather that those women who used abortion as a means of birth control were discouraged, but I can’t see how to do it without harming women who I feel should have access to abortion. It is wrong, it is evil to expect that people be forced to give up as much as nine months of their lives. I am for better sex education and better distribution of birth control ((which many opponents of abortion also seem to be against.)). There needs to be something for when birth control fails. I oppose a police state where each case need be investigated by officials with a humongous case load. My throat constricts when I say this, but I have become Pro-Choice.