Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire My Mind Was Blown; How About Yours?

If you were a woman and raped, what would you do? IF you did not have a choice, what direction would you go? Who are you as a person and are you responsible/emotionally strong enough to not only HANDLE being raped, beaten, violated and god knows what else but now you find out your giving birth. How's that going to affect you in the 8th grade? Can you finish high school? Bummer about your college plans. Hope there is someone who can carry you and your newborn through those BUMPY spots.

Hmmmm. Went from planning a semester abroad to being raped, beaten, pregnant, childbirth, motherhood and enough emotional torment to last 20 lifetimes plus 10 more. I am glad I am not a woman and have no interest in making a choice for her. But I believe it should be their choice. If they are not responsible enough to raise a child out of choice then all bets are off on the welfare of the child thrust upon them....

JMO

W

First of all, take all the motherhood and child-raising elements out of your argument, because there are plenty of folks out there who are eager to adopt babies conceived from rape or incest. No new mother, at least in the United States, is under any obligation to raise a baby she doesn't want.

Second, your emotional torment to last 30 lifetimes is a bit overblown, I think. Arguments depending on a surfeit of drama for their force tend to be bad arguments.

Third, whatever amount of emotional torment is involved in being raped and impregnated must be exceeded by the amount of emotional torment involved in being raped and impregnated and then choosing to murder your own baby. That's not a small thing: I know personally women who have had abortions and then been horrified at themselves in later life.

Okay...now what was your argument again?

Good points, Barak. Hell, I still occasionally feel pangs of regret from accidentally starving a pet tortoise to death when I was eight. I can only imagine how I'd feel if I were responsible for the death of my own offspring.

PS To this day, if I see a tortoise in danger or distress, I stop everything and give it a hand. Countless times I've pulled over on the side of a highway to run out, grab a tortoise, and run him to whatever side he was trying to get to, deep into the rough. Still don't feel like I've made amends.

Me too. Just Google "I regret my abortion" to find a huge number of stories.

That may be true but she absolutly made the choice not to end a life which is why (I think)she came to the conclusion that having the child was the only option.

I could be wrong not having gone through the experience. one of the reasons I'm so adamant about Abortion is I had a girlfriend that went and had one without disscusing it with me now I have a dead child to think about, I think about that child often and it's something I will have to live with because this girl didn't have enough courage to think of anyone else.

Barak, that's a conundrum I've worried over since college. Leaving religion aside, preservation of (innocent) life is paramount. Nobody wants to be killed, it's one assault we cannot overcome. So as an individual and as a society preserving life must be a paramount virtue. And bang you're right back to the question of when life begins. Some opine this, some opine that but nobody knows. If preservation of innocent life is truly a paramount virtue we can only say with certainty that it's at conception or sometime after, however conception occurs. Saying life begins sometime after conception is guessing. How comfortable can one be with that? Some propose that life ends when age-related dementia reaches some arbitrary point.


Me too, but I can say that about any homicide. I see a somewhat greater role for government (society) than you do. If preservation of human life is a paramount virtue, I believe it is incumbent on society to protect and assist those who cannot do so on their own.

(Yeah, super short version with a lot of holes. Books have been written...)

You guys that think raped women should be forced to carry the baby.....would you offer up your wife to save another woman the torment? I thought not.

Yup.

As a Christian, I don't believe preservation of human life is the paramount virtue, of course (and I suspect that if I pushed you hard enough with the right examples you'd decide that it wasn't either, at least not in some cases), but I believe it's pretty darn important.

And, of course, I believe that the phrase "incumbent upon society" dissolves into inconsistency, contradiction, and meaninglessness if you examine it closely enough.

But beyond that, the feature that makes prohibiting abortion qualitatively different from prohibiting other murders is that it's a whole lot easier to prove that a non-abortion murder has taken place than it is to prove that an abortion has taken place. There are measures that can be taken to make it reasonably certain that a prosecutor can prove that a baby has been conceived and aborted (as opposed to miscarried), but all the ones I've heard require massive and appalling usurpations of liberty for huge numbers of women who would never dream of having an abortion.

On the other hand, "Ooh, look, a dead body with forty-three stab wounds! There must have been a murder!" Much easier.

Why do you believe this, HC?

This is one of those topics where I get interested in people's religious backings and how they view abortion. I see some are so anti that they would scorn a woman who was raped for the though of abortion.....let me tell you, living with a woman who was raped, it is a life of hell for them.

I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that some can attempt to make decisions based on someone else's life. Where does the ole' thou shall not judge come in?

Nobody in their right mind would offer up their wife or daught to be raped, yet many will actively tell another how to live after the event.....seems rather judgemental to my eye.

One should experience the joy in the eyes of a 10 year old that was knocked up by her grandfather or a 13 year old that is carrying her dad's kid.

Amen.

In the case of out family it was 100% her decision. She did not even consider an abortion. But I would feel the same about the either way.

But I will tell you abortion has consequences on more than just the baby and the mother. My own mother got pregnant when she was young and had one. In my later life I feel the loss of that older sibling along with the seven that were still born between me and my sister. It is like I knew then and they are now dead. Hard to explain but to me it is real.

I was really asking for arguments. You know, with premises/reasons and conclusions. Not just more unsupported assertions.

I still don't quite get this all. Its ok for the body to refuse to become pregnant or abort itself. But when you had no desire to become pregnant and through no act of your own volition, you are supposed to change your mind and have a child and support that child?

I"m not sure how we'd handle an issue like that here, but I certainly feel that the woman who has to bore the brunt of the issue for 9 months or so should have a say, as should the family that has to do the supporting.

Some issues are so tricky that it should be up to the "owners" to make the decision, not from the gallery of others who do NOT have to bear the burdens.

How many of you (if you could) would make your own daughter go through with a pregnancy caused by a rape?

For me - no way.

It would be between my daughter - and her physician - with no other opinion needed.

Yep

Did I say that was wrong?

Many may rationalize the "justification" for it all that they care to, but every abortion is the intentional destruction of an innocent human life.

This is the FACT that's too often, too easily ignored � usually for the sake of a pre-existing personally preferred conclusion � without any consideration at all except careful, tunnel-vision concentration on ways to support that desired conclusion.

There are, of course, many glib answers �

� but no easy answer that I know of.