Word: incest
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...Louisiana bill and the court's rulings bring to a head the two fierce battles fought this past year: the pro-life movement's push to deny abortion to all pregnant women, even victims of rape and incest; and the pro-choice movement's effort to strike down parental-involvement laws as back-door ways to restrict abortion that do nothing to improve communication between parent and child...
...deal with rape and incest and parental involvement are so-called wedge issues, a way for each side in the abortion debate to prove the unreasonableness of the other side. Even those who strongly favor a woman's right to choose find themselves troubled by the notion of a girl's right to choose, so parental consent or notification has been a comparatively easy sell: 33 states have passed such laws. By forcing the pro-choice movement to challenge this trend, the pro-life movement has been able to paint its opponents as antifamily, bent on weakening the bond between...
...this seems extreme, the same is true -- but with the sides reversed -- on the equally emotional issue of what to do about a child conceived in the violence of rape or incest. The pro-life movement brooks no exception to the absolute position that all abortions, except those to save the life of the mother, are wrong, even ones intended to terminate the progeny of a rapist. Yet this stance may be their undoing. Louisiana's Governor Buddy Roemer, a self-described "right-to-lifer," has promised to veto the just-passed antiabortion bill because it makes no exceptions...
Sometimes when it is not feasible to make abortions following rape or incest illegal, the movement settles for cutting off Medicaid funds. "Rape and incest are tragedies," says Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde, author of the federal restriction, "but why visit on the second victim, the unborn child that is the product of that criminal act, capital punishment?" Forcing only poor women to have the children of their rapists, says the pro-choice movement, shows how heartless the right-to-life movement...
...this issue, like that of parental involvement, is not so simple. The victim of rape or incest is often herself an innocent child in need of saving. Pamela (a pseudonym) was a seventh-grader in Washington when she was allegedly raped by her stepfather. When her mother discovered she was pregnant, she took her to a Planned Parenthood clinic just ten blocks from the White House to arrange an abortion. "She was pitiful," recalls clinic director Mary Vandenbroucke, who had to break the news that Medicaid would not pay the $400 cost of an abortion, even for a case like...