The Rape Exemption

This was my response in a Facebook page for the group Ladies Against Feminism. The topic was Rep. Akin's 'unfortunate' comments, and I am pleased to say that we managed to shift the conversation from screaming about "legitimate rape" to an actual debate on the rape exemption in a proposed ban on abortion.

We had been debating for some time with a couple of feminist women who have been, predictably, proceeding from the viewpoint of secular humanist atheistic feminism. I made a response that I rather liked, and so I post it here for 'everyone' to enjoy:


The problem here is that we are proceeding from a radically different point of view. I could see how, if you do not believe in anything beyond this life, sacrificing yourself for another human being may seem like a flaw rather than a virtue. We Christians, however, follow a God who chose to sacrifice His only Son so that we could have life and have it to the full. Our God is based, not on temporal pleasure, but on love... and that love includes temporal sacrifice for eternal pleasure. Therefore a woman carrying her baby to term, even to give it up for adoption and never see it again, is virtuous.

We also are mostly pro-life... that means that we believe that a human life is created at the moment of conception, a human life as worthy of respect as any human baby, toddler, child, teen, adult, or elder. We do not determine whether a human being deserves basic human rights based on his of her size, age, race, gender, or contributions to society. It follows naturally that we believe that abortion puts to death a human being. That doesn't mean that abortion is Always Evil. Just that its benefits must be stacked up against the detriment of causing the death of a human being.

Given that, I know that from your viewpoint you would never have meant to say this... but your statement did sound as if you will proudly murder someone whether it's against the law or not, because you want to, and you should not be punished for murder because you're a woman - and this is what feminism means. Coming from our viewpoint, I'm sure you can see why feminism seems far more cruel to us than it does to those who do not believe in according basic human rights under the same situation.

Finally, we are not feminists. Rather than trying to claim that women and men are equal in physical form and meant to take identical roles in biology and society, we merely believe that women and men are to be treated equally under the law and are equally capable of petitioning God, with roles in society and biology that are very different, but equal in importance and honor. Therefore, we are very aware of a woman's role in nurturing life and giving of herself to join as partners with God Himself in bringing that life to an eventual state of autonomy. Women are tied strongly to Life in this way... it's no wonder that women have so often been the peacemakers in a society. The women of Sabine and Liberia both created peace and prosperity by joining up, confronting their men, and demanding a cease of hostilities.

As such, Life is our privilege and our business, and carrying a child to term, even an unexpected one, even a child of rape, is bestowing our gift upon the world. It is our privilege to turn something terrible into a blessing. In this way, even outside of our Christian view of sacrifice, giving life and love where there was none is, again, virtuous.

Even so, many of us *are* in favor of a rape exemption for an abortion ban. But we personally would choose life and encourage other women to do the same

Seasons in life

Naturally, there is a very good reason why I have not been posting often in the past months. That reason is a beautiful, perfectly healthy, baby boy added to the family. Dade is our third and likely our last child. I'm getting into the wane of my fertility years, and I had some trouble with the pregnancy and birth.

Life comes in seasons, and seasons come with their own needs and delights. When we first moved into this house, we had friends visit on Saturdays. Now, my youngest brother and his wife bring friends over on Sunday afternoons for video gaming. Different seasons... different people, same fun. Right now my children are young.. a grade schooler, a toddler, and an infant. We have certain rituals and schedules that will pass with the season. Others will not.

I was cleaning and organizing my house and my life. Then this pregnancy started to get more difficult and challenging, and I knew it was not the season for turning my house from its clutter-filled self into a Better Homes and Gardens magazine centerfold. Now, however...

My baby is three and a half months old. Of course I will still spend plenty of time each day hugging and cuddling him, but he needs more than just that now. He has a playmat and a swing where he can learn to reach for toys and shake rattles. My daughter is preschool age now, and it's time for her to pick up some of her simplest ABC's and 123's. My son's homeschooling begins today, just a couple of subjects that run to 36 weeks instead of 35, and he is now in fourth grade. And the house... "is a wreck".

Much needs to be done outdoors, but that will have to wait for a different season, a season in which my baby is toddling along instead of helpless and tiny, a season on which I can handle the chemicals without worrying about them getting into my breastmilk. By next spring I should be able to work on taming our wooded lot, though this fall I hope my grandfather will come with his chainsaw and remove the autumn olives which are trying to creep into our lawn. New England is crazy when it comes to forest. In places like Arizona, you maintain a green stretch of lawn only by fighting the desert daily... in New England, your fight is with the forest, and it will send out saplings as scouts... once the saplings are big enough, they will shelter woods plants and kill off your sun-happy grass. But that fight will wait.

Meanwhile, we are finally managing to deal with the rooms in this house. Most of Tricia's room is cleared out, and she has been moved downstairs. That leaves the nursery free, and now we are working on setting up the baby furniture. Pretty soon we will no longer need to change Dade on the living room table.

Not that it hurt him to be changed on the living room table, mind you. That was a different season, a season of recovery and rest, of cuddling and napping frequently. Now, however, it is time to start moving ahead again.

Perhaps I may be able to start posting more frequently, too.

Panic and Prejudice

The way that the American Left has been dealing with issues lately has got me thinking about their apparent tactics and goals for each of us. Twice in the past month or so, they have taken a legitimate debate that is actually on their side, and turned it into a screaming mess. Now the Left has never seemed terribly averse to turning issues into screaming messes, but usually they do so because the majority is not on their side. Lately, however, they seem intent on turning discussion into fits of anger, even when the discussion would advance their side.

A few days ago, Todd Akin, a candidate for the U.S. Senate, was asked about his opinion on abortion in the case of rape. He said:

Well you know, people always want to try to make that as one of those things, well how do you, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.

Almost immediately, the Left sprang into action, and within hours there were angry blog posts and opinion articles claiming that Akin doesn't believe a woman can get pregnant unless she enjoyed the sex. Of course, you can look at the answer yourself and see that he said pregnancy from rape was rare, not nonexistent, and that the female body limits fertility under stress. Both of these statements are utterly true, by the way. The statistical incidence of pregnancy from a single act of rape (assuming no contraception and healthy people) vary from 1-5% depending on the study, while the statistical incidence of pregnancy from a single consensual act (assuming no contraception and healthy people) is roughly 10%. (5% for the three non-ovulating weeks, 25% for the one ovulating week.) Most women can tell you of the time when they had a scary college exam, or a nasty 24-hr stomach bug, or a big scare, and it delayed ovulation. It isn't about a woman consciously telling her body to shut down because of rape... it's a simple adrenaline/cortisol reaction that is not controlled by her conscious mind. But let's put that aside for a moment, and look at what Akin actually said.

"I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child."

There, right there... he basically claimed that there should not be a rape exemption to an abortion ban. That's the gold mine. That's the money quote. The majority of pro-lifers support a rape exemption. Even those who would rather not see an abortion in that situation would not want to enforce it by Federal law. The Left could have divided the pro-life movement by focusing on Akin's actual answer. Instead, they chose to jump all over his side comment on how stress impacts fertility and treat him like he's a total imbecile for even suggesting such a thing.

This reminds me of the previous big controversy, touched off when Chick-Fil-A founder Dan Cathy was asked about his company's support of a marriage program.

“We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that,”

Now this one turned into a big "He's against gays" controversy, when the context had nothing to do with homosexuality at all. It had to do with divorce. Now the majority of people in this country support no-fault divorce, and here Dan Cathy appears to be dissing it. "But what if you 'grow apart'? What if you love someone else? What if you want to go find 'your true potential'?" Even among those who do not want to have a no-fault divorce, few would seek to destroy it. Even those who agree that there is a problem with the current divorce rate are not eager to ban no-fault divorce. Of course, Cathy didn't claim that he wanted to ban it either, but my point is that divorce (especially no-fault) is clearly the issue here, and most people would see the removal of no-fault divorce as a step backwards for this country.

However, instead, it became all about the homosexuals. The Silent Majority awoke, and stretched lines around the parking lot and into the street in support of the chain's right to not wholeheartedly support the total redefinition of marriage to include gay sex. Traffic cops got called out in many areas due to the sheer volume of visitors. Meanwhile, a couple of gay activist groups decided to demonstrate to us why we should keep the government out of our bedrooms by engaging in passionate lip-locking in front of a family restaurant. What a mess! What a disaster for the Left! But if they had just stuck to the actual issue, they would have gained support instead of losing it.

We could have spent the last month or so in honest discussion about the merits and detriments of no-fault divorce, or situations in which abortion may or may not be a valid decision. Instead, the Left has us talking about "legitimate rape" and "hate chicken". I am not sure that I want to be as pessimistic as Rush Limbaugh, my husband, and several other people to whom I have mentioned this, but they do have an interesting point to make... if the Left encourages us to start thinking and discussing these issues rationally, we might start thinking and discussing other issues rationally.

Issues like Obamacare, oil costs, housing prices, the economy in general, contraception mandates, a major political party endorsing gay marriage, and the turmoil in the Middle East where the Arab Spring is giving way to a Fundamentalist Muslim Winter.