In May 2023, Louisiana lawmakers rejected a push to add rape and incest exceptions to the state’s abortion restrictions. Opponents cried Handmaid’s Tale.
“I simply do not understand how we as a state can tell any victim that she must be forced by law to carry her rapist’s baby to term, regardless of the impact on her own physical or mental health, the wishes of her parents, or the medical judgment of her physician,” Louisiana Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards protested. “As I have said before, rape and incest exceptions protect crime victims. We must do all that we can to protect them and sadly, the committee failed to do so today.”
Rape and sexual assault have long-lasting traumatic effects on their victims. While men and boys are at risk, 90% of adult rape victims are females in their childbearing years. Of these, 94% are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in the two weeks following the rape.
A just human society – including the United States – has a moral mandate to combat this brutality through vigorous prosecution, the heaviest penalties to deter would-be offenders, compassionate care for victims, and the formation of virtuous citizens.
Pregnancy and Rape
According to the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the American “rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year.”
Of these, 50% choose abortion, making up about 1% of abortions in the United States annually. This means over 15,000 children die annually in the United States because their fathers are rapists.
But given the trauma suffered by victims of sexual assault, those deaths are often seen as the price of peace for the mothers. Over and above the trauma of the assault itself, a pregnancy resulting from a rape is a daily reminder of the attack. Women who become pregnant from rape must wrestle with being the mother of a child whose father brutally terrorized her.
A vast majority (86% by one poll) of Americans believe that a woman who is pregnant by rape ought to be able to terminate the pregnancy, including 76% of registered Republicans. And the phrase “except in cases of rape and incest” has been the go-to compromise for politicians who want to earn pro-life votes without appearing extreme or indifferent to rape victims.
No More Exceptions
But since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, exceptions for rape and incest are no longer a given in abortion legislation or pro-life efforts.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a pro-abortion health policy research organization, 14 of the 18 states with six-to-15-week abortion restrictions chose not to include exceptions for rape and incest, with Louisiana being the most recent to reaffirm its decision.
While Americans for decades were able to ignore the “rape and incest exception” language under Roe’s federal abortion-on-demand policy, the issue is back on the table.
‘Blame the Victims’ Exceptions
Pro-lifers must confront the reality that the “exceptions” compromise ignores the humanity of the child, the central fact on which their condemnation of abortion ultimately rests. They can no longer afford to ignore the question of whether abortion actually aids in the victim’s recovery or simply perpetuates the violence she suffered.
Abortion is perceived as a compassionate option for a rape victim because it allows her to move on with her life more quickly. But terminating the pregnancy does not change the fact that she was the victim of violent assault. Dr. Sandra Kathleen Mahkorn, who has conducted one of the few large-scale studies on pregnancy and sexual assault, notes that in responses to her survey:
Fifty percent of the responses to the question relating to the special needs of pregnant sexual assault victims dealt with the importance of addressing feelings or issues related to the rape experience. …Perhaps too often the pregnancy receives the most attention and the anger, guilt, fear, and lower self-esteem related to the assault fail to be addressed.
Abortion carries with it a significant risk of compounding the mother’s self-blame, hatred, and anger. In addition to the rape, she now will most likely carry the memory of the abortion as an additional trauma.
Although formal research on this matter appears to be sparse, those who have worked with post-abortive women have compiled thousands of women’s testimonies, impossible to ignore, that show how they experienced abortion not as a remedy, but as a devastating trauma, even in cases of pregnancies resulting from rape.
Accusations of “forced pregnancy” attempt to equate pro-life legislation with violence against rape victims. But pro-life laws neither instigate nor perpetuate violence: the rapist is the aggressor. Blaming lawmakers who want to help both victims – the mother and the child – shifts the burden of guilt away from the actual criminal. The question ought to be, “How do we care for both victims with compassion and punish the responsible party?”
Some also argue that abortion in cases of rape and incest is simply a form of self-defense and therefore both morally licit and legally necessary. To abort the child of a rapist is to participate in a classic “blame the victim” game – a fate suffered by many rape victims. No child should suffer for the crimes of his father or mother, just as no rape victim should be told it was her own fault.
To decline to assist in an abortion in the case of rape and incest is to decline to perpetuate violence. It is a refusal to choose violence as a remedy for a woman’s trauma and as cover for a society that failed to protect her. At the same time, it is a demand on our communities to remove the fear and alleviate the woman’s own suffering. Eliminating the “rape and incest exceptions” would impose a mandate on American society to redress the terrible violence done to women and treat treat them as mothers in need of hope, healing, and unconditional love.
