You’ve seen all the articles on abortion going around. You’ve seen all the pro-choice and pro-life arguments.
I’m addressing this to the mom who has daughters, wondering if she could counsel her daughter to keep a child, should her daughter get pregnant from rape.
No one wants to be in that position. I pray that neither you nor I will ever have to talk to our daughters about saying no to abortion because there’s an innocent life hanging in the balance.
But that conversation, should it have to take place, is no different from the talk that we have with our children about becoming saints or martyrs.
Every one of us with a child to shepherd into heaven knows how difficult it is explain the impact life choices have on our ultimate destination. Rape and abortion would make that conversation a thousand times more difficult, but that doesn’t mean that the rightness of a decision changes.
I don’t want my child threatened with a beheading or a shooting and made to choose to renounce his or her faith. But I pray that if such a moment comes, he or she would be able to make the choice to live (or die) as he or she believes.
The thing about faith is that we don’t always get to choose what hill we get to die on. We don’t always get to choose which crosses we want to carry. Sometimes that cross is thrust into our hands when we are totally unprepared. But that is why we pray that we be given the grace to say fiat on those days when saying so goes against every fiber of our being.
So no, I can’t say with 100% certainty that if it should happen to any of my daughters, that I would counsel her against abortion. I can only pray for the grace and strength and courage to do exactly that.
“Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”
Some facts about the abortion debate:
Argumentum ad passiones, appealing to emotion, is something that abortion advocates are very good at. They take the 1% of abortion cases to justify 100% of abortion cases. For a thorough discussion of that statistic please read Ryan Scott Bomberger, himself conceived in rape:
He explains better than I can where that statistic comes from.
5% is the number that regularly gets thrown around, but even Guttmacher’s (the abortion organization International Planned Parenthood Federation’s “research arm”, where all the “scientific data” on abortion comes from) acknowledges that rape-pregnancy cases are a very small percentage of abortion cases.
Source: https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/pubs/psrh/full/3711005.pdf
The vast number of abortions are ELECTIVE. Some even use it for contraception. And population controllers (yes, they exist) see abortion as ESSENTIAL in controlling the global population.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/3709011/?i=3&from=/1188406/related
I urge you to review this list of Hard Cases: It includes expert testimonies from doctors as to the “necessity” of abortion.
More:
Food for thought:
Abortion is additional trauma compounding the trauma from rape. We shouldn’t assume that a victim pregnant from rape would want an abortion. See these testimonies from women: http://afterabortion.org/rape.html, as well as this piece from Rebecca Kiessling, herself conceived in rape, the woman behind Save The 1, and now a pro life lawyer taking on the hard cases to save the unborn from abortion:
What the rape victim needs is support, which of course looks different for conservatives and liberals. For abortion advocates, support means providing access to abortion. For pro-lifers it means providing mental, emotional, spiritual, financial, physical support to the mother to empower her to choose life for her baby.
See this explanation from Filipino OB-Gyn Dr. Ryan Borja Capitulo:
And this comment from a rape victim:
Source: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=886851795614&id=88300804
Bottom line, ALL life is precious and unrepeatable because ALL life comes from God, no matter the circumstances surrounding the conception, no matter the educational attainment, the color, the gender, the financial status, or mental health of the mother.
Friends, let’s keep praying for each other as we continue this fight.
St. Gianna Beretta Molla, St. Philomena, St. Maria Goretti, St. John Paul II, Mama Mary, pray for us!!
[If there’s weird formatting my apologies, wrote this on my phone as we are out of town and I didn’t bring my laptop with me. I hope it’s clear enough to read though.]
Thank you for writing this because it summarizes my beliefs as well as what I’ve learned with regards to the matter.