Pregnancy by Rape or Incest

I hear the stories of Muslim fathers who butcher their raped daughters because these girls have blemished their precious "honor".

I hear American representatives elected by the people claiming there is a difference between "legitimate" i.e. "real" rape and "illegitimate" rape i.e. she said no but meant yes.

My child-bearing years ended decades ago with a hysterectomy. I am well past menopause. But the thought of a woman, any woman, being forced to bear the abomination of a pregnancy inflicted upon her by a rapist's attack still curdles the blood pounding through my veins.

The Church and religion in which I was raised leads the field of those who would insist "punish the rapist, not the child." But what of the victim of the crime? The woman forced first by the superior physical strength of her attacker to undergo the vicious attack upon her very person hood and then by the male-dominated legislaturalists and religionists to bear the hideous fruit of that attack in her body for nine excruciating months?

I speak directly to the Church I abandoned in the 1990s when I finally realized it was a Church that loved men and despised women - This is unacceptable. Your institution protected the rapists of children. Your institution condemned the parents of those children for "attacking the Church" when they protested the violation of those children. Your institution abandoned the nuns who dedicated their lives to your good works or castigated them for not pursuing your anti-abortion anti-birth control agenda and concentrating on serving the poor, the unrepresented, the needy.

A woman, any woman, who is forced by her society's laws to bear the child inflicted upon her by rape or incest has been betrayed by that society. She has been enslaved.