Trump Sends Out Tweet About ‘Rape’ Exceptions For Abortion, Gets Slammed By Two Pro-Life Orgs

If you look at the article, LiveAction’s response is actually quite measured—a quick tweet of a woman’s testimony about how her healing was helped as she bore her rapist’s child, Their data also suggests that those who are raped are in general better off if they bear that child.

That doesn’t prove that the law ought to ban abortion even in cases of rape, of course. It helps, though, and the trump card (pun intended) is the fact that the child doesn’t deserve the death penalty because his father committed a capital crime—Ezekiel 18, of course.

Joe, the guy you’re thinking of is Todd Akin, who said he believed that rape rarely led to pregancy in 2012, and ended up throwing the election to Claire McCaskill as a result. He later doubled down on them.

Reality; it appears that up to 0.5-0.75% of births are from sexual assault of various types. I did some calculation, and if (IF) the numbers I have are correct, it actually appears that the various forms of sexual assault are more likely to result in pregnancy than consensual relationships for a few reasons, starting with the fact that I’d guess the victims are as a whole younger, and continuing to the fact that I’d have to guess rapists (whether drunken date rape or forcible or whatever) would take fewer precautions to prevent pregnancy.

And the guy who said date rape wasn’t real rape is Barry Hovis of Missouri. He’s right that most rapes are by someone known to the victim (a.k.a. “date rape” and the like), but he’s wrong that we ought to consider it “consensual.” Yes, there are false reports—2-10% of total reports, and we can wonder whether the psychological and other effects are different, but that doesn’t mean the rest are “consensual” by any stretch of the imagination.

(most rape reports—up to 88-96% of those to police—actually end up in the bin of “we don’t have sufficient evidence to continue investigating. Sometimes it’s just cases the DA won’t touch, and sometimes it’s things like not processing a rape kit or not wanting to locate someone who’s not in that police department’s jurisdiction)

Cities and some states are slowly moving toward “investigate all accusations and test all kits” policy. This is very expensive because there is so much alleged rape and assault that’s on the margins of “was it consensual or wasn’t it?” Still, my gut tells me it’s the right thing to do. I guess time and research will give us a better idea of whether this is actually effective in overall efforts to reduce and/or prosecute crime.

But when it can be determined beyond a reasonable doubt, it should be obvious that non-consensual sex—whether “date” related or not—is rape and a crime and should be viewed as a crime.

Whether that has anything to do with letting a baby be born is another question entirely. Pro-lifers would be wise not to try to minimize the evil of rape in order to argue for protecting the unborn. The two really have almost nothing to do with eachother.

Personally, my view is that if you spend the money to collect the evidence, you might as well process it and get it in a database. If not, why on earth are you taking the evidence?

But that said, when someone paid the sheckels to get about 20,000 of them processed, I think it did put a couple hundred people in jail. Nationwide, that would mean that if all 250,000 unprocessed kits were processed, you’d likely end up putting a couple thousand people in jail where they belong. Given that the “average” rapist doesn’t just rape one person, this could put a serious dent in the overall rates of sexual assault—and the costs of dealing with the fallout.

Which are not, of course, borne by the police, but by the taxpayer in other ways. Might be good to make sure that cost enters into the equation, to put it mildly, as things like mental health counseling and the like don’t come cheap.