Republican U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock stated the opinion that women who were impregnated by rape must carry their children because he believes all life is sacred, but he’s only looking at the life of the child and not the life of the woman. For him to think the pregnancies from rape are “something that God intended to happen” is just not viewing the statistics, remembering that a woman of childbearing age (not on birth control) has a 20-25% chance of being of being fertile when raped.
Does he know the statistics of suicide among rape victims? How about suicide among pregnant rape victims with no options?
There’s an awesome article in CNN today titled When ‘God’s will,’ rape and pregnancy collide. It contains discussions with many religious leaders who do not share Mr. Mourdock’s stance on “God’s intent.” On of my favorite quotes was, “Someone getting pregnant through rape simply means biology continues to function,” Father Tom Reese said. “That doesn’t mean God wills it.”
Then again, maybe this is my favorite quote: Paul Root Wolpe, the director for the Center of Ethics at Emory University, said Mourdock’s comments were the equivalent “of saying you shouldn’t pull people out of the rubble because God intended the earthquake to happen or we shouldn’t try to cure disease because it’s God who gave us the disease,” Wolpe said. “That perspective was theologically rejected by virtually every major religion a long, long time ago,” Wolpe added.
This brings me to emergency contraception. So many fundamentalist, scare-tactic, fear-mongering, people have been hyping it as abortion. It is not abortion. All it does is cause a woman to start her period early. That means that something the size of, at most, a few cells would end up on a sanitary product as the endometrial lining of the woman leaves her body. Assuming it was there at all. It should be a right for all women following rape. Some people want it to be a requirement to give it to all rape victims. I don’t know about “requirement.
I think it should be a requirement to offer it, but a woman’s right to refuse. There. That covers it.