Word: rape
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...boards across campus last week. With chiding eyes, she asked us whether she deserved the death sentence that we, society, had given her. Her full lips rebuked us, and her flaxen locks seemed to shine with lost potential. Then she delivered her punch line: She had been conceived through rape, and her “death penalty” was an abortion, one that society would have permitted to take place. Her message was clear: Abortions, regardless of the means of conception, are murder...
...this philosophical dead end misses the more important and more practical question: Should an early-stage embryo, such as one conceived through rape, have the same standing in society as an adult? Fortunately, this problem is far more easily resolved, with the help of a few critical but shockingly under-mentioned scientific truths. Indeed, if an embryo and an adult are equivalent, as the Harvard Right to Life posters seem to propose, then any rational system of social ethics will degenerate into absurdity...
They are, of course, nonexistent. We feel no empathy for embryos in this context and see no need to assign to them any conception of death or dying. Yet, in a parallel context, such as if a rape victim is given a drug to prevent embryo implantation, people suddenly introduce the notion of “killing” a child. What causes this leap of logic...
While this argument cannot, of course, be extrapolated to the debate over how to treat post-implantation embryos, the conclusion is nonetheless extremely relevant socially. For example, it shows that rape victims’ decisions to prevent embryo implantation are perfectly acceptable ethically, and can in no way be compared to the “death penalty...
...year, but one of them is particularly high profile. In South Dakota citizens will vote to repeal a law passed in February that bans all abortions, except in cases where the mother"s life is threatened (legislators voted against amendments that provided exemptions for women who became pregnant through rape or incest). If voters choose to keep the law, challenges to its constitutionality are expected, quite possibly all the way to the Supreme Court. That is exactly what the law's backers, who want it to serve as a test case to try and overturn Roe v. Wade now that...