“Rape is violence. Abortion is more violence.”
Today’s guest author is Mrs. Meggy.
It’s not helpful or compassionate to rape survivors who get pregnant to push abortion as the solution. It happened to me: I found out I was pregnant shortly after I was raped.
I went to my counselor at the crisis center. I told her I had just had a positive pregnancy test at home. Her immediate response was not to ask how I was feeling, what I wanted to do, or what I was thinking, but to tell me that since I’d been raped, Medicaid would cover “the procedure” at Planned Parenthood, and I could get in right away since the crisis center had a relationship with them. I got more upset at that point. I told my counselor I didn’t need an immediate abortion, I needed help processing the fact I was pregnant by my rapist and whether to parent or give the baby up.
I was already so conflicted about being pregnant by this violent act, and here’s the solution being proposed: let’s stick metal instruments up your already violated self and rip that kid right out, that’ll fix it. Sorry, no. I consider the rapist nothing but a sperm donor.
The baby was my child. Mine alone. It took me a couple weeks to get to that point, but that’s where I came down. I couldn’t blame the baby for how he/she came to be.
I will never know if I would’ve chosen to parent because the day I had to testify for the preliminary hearing, I began to bleed after being on the stand 8 hours. I went in for a blood test and my hormone levels had dropped. I miscarried that baby at home. I saw the body. It was traumatic as hell.
The ER made it worse. The OB resident informed me that my body had “done such a good job cleaning itself out, it spared me the trouble of getting rid of it later.” That’s a direct quote I will never forget. If I hadn’t been getting an infusion of platelets, I would’ve jumped off my bed and hit that SOB. He assumed that because I was a rape survivor, I would get rid of the baby. A common assumption. Nearly everyone makes that assumption, even in pro-life circles.
How dare you? Rape is violence. Abortion is more violence. Killing the babies who result from rape is not healing. Survivors need to heal from violence, and when it comes to the few of us who end up pregnant, we need help, not even more trauma.
Yes, carrying a baby conceived in rape is very hard. For the time I did, my emotions swung wild in terms of how I felt about it. But the solution to difficult emotions isn’t killing an innocent!
I got pregnant by rape, got the hard pitch to abort from a rape counselor, lost the baby, and had an ER doc assume miscarriage spared me the trouble. Quit assuming abortion is the healing solution for pregnant rape victims. It’s condescending. And abortion creates another victim.
You can read the original Twitter thread here.
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