Two Tragedies for the Price of One: Abortion in the Case of Rape or Incest

Abortion is an issue already fraught with deep emotions, for people of many different political and social persuasions, of different ethnic backgrounds and religious creeds. All the more do emotions play a role in the matter when a woman's pregnancy is a result of tragic circumstances such as rape or incest. There may very well be, certain pro-choice advocates may hold, a place for considering the personhood of the unborn child, but, when the context of a woman's pregnancy is the tragic event of her violent defilement at the hands of a rapacious, subhuman monster, the normally corresponding debate of the morality of abortion is immutably placed on the shelf for another time. This line of argumentation is also frequently used as a last resort when the person arguing for abortion may begin to see that in most cases the procedure is indeed exactly what its opponents say it is: murder.

This being the case, and rather than continue to argue for murder-on-demand for convenience or inconvenience (which constitutes for more than 90% of abortion cases in America), the now intellectually confused abortion advocate feels compelled to salvage his position by making the case for legalized baby murder with the argument for abortion in cases of "extreme circumstances," i.e. rape or incest. This argument is essentially a last ditch effort to rescue from the heap of other bad arguments for abortion what is probably the worst argument for abortion in light of the evidence which led the abortion advocate to his desperate state to begin with: the presumed personhood of the unborn child! Apparently, the unborn person may now very well be a person, though, despite this wisdom the debate is no longer about the status of the unborn child in the womb, but how she came to be there to begin with. The abortion advocate's argument changes; what the child is in its mother's womb is no longer the context of the debate - though this is the very heart of the debate! - and despite the accepted postulate that the child in the womb is a person deserving of every protection the same as that of a fully mature child outside the womb, how the child came to be in its mother's womb, via consent or rape, is the new determining factor in any definition of the unborn child's worth and status.

The abortion advocate has lapsed into an intellectual schizophrenia. When taking into consideration this particular argument, as infrequent as its necessity may be, it becomes obvious that, of all the numerous arguments for abortion, this is the most emotionally charged. In spite of this, emotions, however warranted they may be in cases like this, must not nor should they be given priority over reason, evidence, and moral sense.

What follows is a more thorough critique of this argument.

A Very Brief Historical Overview

Abortion has been with us since the earliest days of what we still consider to be Western civilization. It was a widely accepted practice in both Greece and Rome, with parents possessing the legal right to exterminate their unborn child if it was financially or socially expedient to do so. Hippocrates tended to rule against it, as one of the key principles of his famous "Oath," a physician's creed of sorts, was that the physician should do no harm in any circumstance. It is also likely that Pythagoras and those who followed him clung to a very strict position siding against abortion. In the case of both Plato and Aristotle we see something different. Plato felt that abortion should be necessary on the grounds that it would inevitably keep pure the Guardian class of his fabled utopia, the plans for which he lays out in his Republic. Plato develops his idea of a utopia along the lines of a strict eugenic principle; at one point he has Socrates state:

As soon, however, as the men and the women have passed the age prescribed for producing children, we shall leave them free to form a connection with who they will...; and all this only after we have exhorted them to see that no child, if any conceived, shall be brought to light, or, if they cannot prevent his birth, to dispose of it on the understanding that no such child can be reared. (Republic 5.461)

That Plato seems to favor infanticide for the expressed purpose of securing the best possible Guardian class, thus, also securing the perfect state, there can be little doubt. In another key passage illustrating his position he reveals that

As soon as children are born, they will be taken in charge by officers appointed for the purpose, who may be men or women or both, since offices are to be shared by both sexes. The childen of the better parents they will carry to the chreche to be reared in the care of nurses living apart in a certain quarter of the city. Those of inferior parents and any children of the rest that are born defective will be hidden away, in some appropriate manner that must be kept secret. They must be, if the breed of our Guardians is to be kept pure. (Republic 5.460)

It is safe to assume that Plato supported both infanticide and the regulation of births in a utilitarian effort to gurantee a utopian society built upon specific class structures, while also emphasizing the uniquely egalitarian quality of his vision for a perfect society. What is ultimately difficult to determine, however, is what additional reasons, if any, Plato supplied for the taking of infant life over and above the purely utilitarian reasons he advanced for the extermination of unborn life.

In the case of Aristotle things get trickier. It is true that Aristotle, like Plato, argues for abortion along utilitarian lines. He judges the act to have moral justification particulalrly in matters of population control. According to Aristotle, "if no restriction is imposed on the rate of reproduction...poverty is the inevitable result; and poverty produces, in its turn, civic dissension and wrong doing" (Politics 7.1265). It is fair to assume that Aristotle would have likely taken little issue with couples resorting to contraceptive measures in order to achieve specifically ideal population levels in a healthy, well-functioning state. In Politics 7.1335, Aristotle further states:

The question arises whether children should always be reared or may sometimes be exposed to die. There should certainly be a law to prevent the rearing of deformed children. On the other hand, there should also be a law, in all states where the system of social habits is opposed to unrestricted increase, to prevent the exposure of children to death merely in order to keep the population down. The proper thing to do is to limit the size of each family, and if children are then conceived in excess of the limit so fixed, to have miscarriage induced before sense and life have begun in the embryo.

Aristotle condones abortion out of a sense for the "greater good." Also, it becomes plainly obvious that he also recognizes the alleged necessity for abortion in the case of a deformed newborn. Before, however, jumping to any conclusions, one must understand Aristotle's theory of goods. He counts as life's chief non-moral goods (i.e. qualities that contribute significantly to living the good life) both good birth, which includes sound heredity, and health, which includes freedom from disease and the full possession of bodily faculties. Given that a deformed infant would apparently be deprived of either or both of these valued attributes - by Aristotle's reasoning, of course! - one again observes Aristotle's concern for the supposed greater good of the whole community in his approval of infanticide.

The point of this short analysis, while not being nearly as exhaustive as it certainly could be, was to merely illustrate the absurdity inherent in any insistence that the matter of abortion is a strictly "Christian issue." Much to the contrary, long before God took upon Himself our mortal flesh, and the subsequent rise of Christendom, even pre-Christian antiquity wrestled with the moral dilemma of abortion. However, this is not to suggest that the revelation of God in Christ did not transform the debate, in the process challenging most of the moral presuppositions of pagan philosophy, thus, also eventually raising the moral status of the human person to a level of inestimable worth and absolute dignity in a way the ancient world priorly had yet to conceive. It should go without saying that without this radical reorientation of what it means to be human, i.e. for man to be created in the image of his Creator, the eventual doctrine of human rights, so idolized by even the most ardent of infanticide supporters, a doctrine which even in its most progressive form continues to presume the immutable necessity of clinging to the moral capital of the Judeo-Christian tradition (minus certain small encumberances like, say, God), would be a fiction, if not at best a mere psychological justification for a cheap, nihilistic emotivism.

The Issue

Is abortion in the case of rape or incest permissable? Any truly moral response to this question must be grounded in an equal concern for both mother and child. As abortion in general is persistently defined as a "rights" issue, we must also distinguish not between whose rights should prevail, but which rights should be observed in this case. We must also maintain full and equal concern for both parties involved, the woman and the child, identifying with each. Finally, following the spirit of the Hippocratic Oath, we must adhere to the principle of doing no harm when treating individuals with medical and/or psychological (as well as emotional) trauma; it goes without saying, as well, that we will presume that no one should ever do harm to one person in order to benefit another.

The child conceived in rape is one of us, merely smaller and less developed and more dependent, and not in full view, but equally a person. Killing her is wrong, just as killing any child is wrong. We must remember that the child is absolutely innocent of the crime of her father. She is not a part of her mother's body, and she is not a part of her father's character. She inherits character traits from both parents, but in her individual being as a person, she is absolutely distinct from both of them. The child is totally her own person. She is not responsible for the crime that led to her conception, and she is untainted by it. Seeing her in these negative ways is sheer prejudice, not based on reality, but at odds with it. Yes, rape is horrible beyond words. So is abortion. Abortion means killing a child in ghastly ways that cause terrible pain. Abortion for rape is wrong because it adds a second horror to the first: the murder of an innocent child.

If abortion for a child conceived in loving intercourse (married or otherwise) is murder, it is still murder when the child is conceived in cases of rape or incest. The form of intercourse, whether voluntary or forced, has no bearing on the dignity and worth of the child conceived. Also, it has no bearing on the question of whether abortion is murder. Abortion is murder because of what it does to its victim, regardless of how she was conceived. Certainly, we all identify with the woman. We must do the same with the child; we will say "Do not kill this child! Spare her the agonizing death of dismemberment or burning of her skin."

As implied above, we must never do evil so that good may be achieved. Denying an abortion for a woman who has been raped is not a denial of the woman or a lack of concern for her well being. It is simply a refusal to do evil! We could never kill the woman in attempting to benefit someone else in a way that is comparable to the alleged benefit for the woman expected of an abortion. If we could not kill the woman in order to achieve an expected good, we cannot kill the child for an expected good either. There must be a moral presumption to protect the lives of both the mother and the child.

An addendum to the Do No Harm Principle would be what is called the No Duty-Non Forcing Principle: one has no duty to lay down her life to save another, still less to benefit her in some lesser way. Ergo, it would be wrong for anyone to force her to do so. Exactly the same applies to the child in the womb. She has no duty to give up her life for another, including her mother. That she was conceived in violent intercourse changes nothing with regard to her being as a person, and her rights as a person - including her right not to be forced to die for someone else's benefit.

The moral judgment called for here - that abortion is wrong because it is wrong to commit murder to alleviate suffering - is basically a positive one for the child, not a negative one against the woman. It is made to protect the child, that she not be the victim of a second violence. It is not made to restrict the woman; it merely expresses the obligation to respect the child as a person deserving the same right to life as any other person, be they unborn, five years old, thirty-five years old, or eighty years old (e.g. a person is a person is a person!). The refusal to allow abortion in cases of rape is not a failure of compassion. On the contrary, allowing abortion is a lack of compassion for unborn children. It is approving their murder, the violation of their most fundamental right, the right to life. Saying no to the woman is not a lack of compassion for her, but simply calling attention to what abortion is: murder. Refusal to sanction murder is not a lack of compassion!

"The woman," some say, "was not given a choice. Had she freely engaged in the sexual act, yes, she should now bear the responsibility for its consequences. But since it was forced on her, she should not be forced to continue her pregnancy." Fine. However, if I am unjustly denied a choice, does that give me the right to kill an innocent person?! Damn me if I should! I may certainly not kill the person who denied me the choice (after the fact, as a way of trying to compensate for the denial of choice), nor may I kill a person totally innocent of unjustly denying me a choice. This is the child in the womb. "Well, it was wrong that the woman was raped. It is wrong for her to have this child. Therefore, she can now get rid of it via an abortion." The child is her child, not a parasite. This remains the case regardless of however the child was conceived. Two wrongs do not make a right: they remain two wrongs. If you are wronged by person A, you cannot turn around and do wrong to person B as a way of undoing the first wrong. The woman has been wronged by the rapist, A. She cannot now try to undo this wrong or its effects by doing wrong to her baby, B. Innocent person B has no duty to give up her life for another, either to the benefit to the other to right a wrong for that person.

Some also stress the reality that the child is a constant reminder of the horror of the rape event. It is argued, then, that the woman should be allowed to rid herself of this reminder. To those who advance this point: Are you really saying that we may kill another person on the grounds that she is a reminder of some horrible event?! Admittedly, yes, the child is the most intimate reminder as she is present in her mother's womb, but this is merely a psychological difference from other cases. It is not a morally relevant difference, however.

Conclusion

Abortion is wrong because it is the unjust destruction of a child. It is also wrong because it is an assualt on a woman. There is a deep connection between the two. The woman and the child, though absolutely distinct as individual persons, are nonetheless intimately joined together, not only physically but in a meaningful personal way. The child, according to nature and the providence of God, is entrusted to the mother, sheltered and secured in her being. She carries the child in herself. Abortion is a violent attack on this most intimate union. The child is forcibly ripped out, against his instinctive clinging to remain in his secure resting place. In this way, abortion is also an attack on the woman. Such an attack is bound to take its toll, both physically and psychologically. That abortion is bad for women is what we should expect; it would be strange if it were not so. When it seems not to be, when women say that they were better off having an abortion, one wonders whether this optimism does not mask a deeper hidden wound. Sometimes they realize it later, as Nancyjo Mann did: "The abortion killed not only my daughter, it killed a part of me."

There is a risk for all women who abort, but especially for those who do so in the "hard" cases, such as rape or incest. David Reardon, a well known clinical psychologist, says such women "are much more likely to suffer from severe emotional and psychiatric stress after their abortion than are those who abort merely for convenience." In general: "The more difficult the circumstances prompting abortion, the more likely the woman will suffer severe post-abortion sequelae." This is supported from the World Health Organization study that reads: "Thus the very women for whom legal abortion is considered justified on psychiatric grounds are the ones who have the highest risk of post-abortion psychiatric disorders." Reardon also notes, "Within all the psychiatric literature available, there is not one psychiatric condition for which abortion is a recognized cure. Instead, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that true psychological problems are generally complicated and aggravated by abortion rather than alleviated by it.