A commenter known as Normal_Guy (now CamoCoyote) offers up pregnancy due to rape as a justification for aborting the child. He writes:
Being raped is offensive enough. Carrying the consequence to term is extending the offense. A woman cleans herself physically, symbolically and emotionally after she is raped. Aborting a pregnancy as a consequence of rape is more of the same. I find it difficult to believe there are people that would insist their daughter, sister, mother or wife should give birth to a baby resulting from being raped???
I believe the count is at 54 million unborn lives snuffed out legally since Rowe v Wade. How many were the comprehensive "cleansings" prescribed by the Normal_Guy? Pregnancy from rape is quite rare, let's over-estimate and say 50,000. Under Normal_Guy thinking, we justify an industry that performs at least 999 killings for every 1 rationalized cleansing. Put in other words, each of these rape victims are "cleansed" with the blood of 1000 children -- including the blood of her own child. And somehow we assume that post-19th century rape victims with-child fare better with their abortion option than enduring women in the same situation for the many centuries before. Because the society of this age has no concept of sharing pain and carrying the burden of victims communally, it multiplies the horror onto others. People think this cycle of violence is only found in war and terror; think again. For the sake of approximately 50 thousand pregnancies from sexual assault, Americans have snuffed out 54 million innocent lives so far.
I suppose I am suggesting that for the 40 years since Roe v Wade, a little more than 1000 abortions a year are for pregnancies from rape, even though forcible rapes are roughly 80,000 a year. Surveys indicate that forcible rape is under-reported, and many incidents of intercourse without force but without consent occur in large numbers. Since we are putting the life of the child on the line, it seems appropriate to limit ourselves to the cases where a formal complaint for rape is presented. A thousand pregnancies from 80,000 rapes is not unreasonable given that a large percentage of the victims can be assumed to be using birth control or otherwise infertile, that the tension of rape is not conducive to conception, and that there are only 6 fertile days a month for the average adult female. An article at WSJ indicates that there really is no reliable data on the subject, see http://tinyurl.com/8j9fkoa. Sexual assault is a terrible crime that has been with us for centuries and likely to remain for centuries more, but no one is suggesting that a significant portion of the 54 million abortions in America is due to rape.
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