It is the official policy of this website that we will not allow the abortion debate to be hijacked by the “But what about in cases of rape!” misdirection.
Personally, if a woman is raped and her rapist is found guilty and convicted in court, I have no problem with allowing that woman to have an abortion. Fine.
But the reason I refuse to even discuss that aspect of abortion is because pregnancies due to rape are so rare. The overwhelming majority of abortions are done in the interest of convenience and enabling rampant consequence-free sex.
Back when it still reported facts, the New York Times reported that approximately 1% of abortions were due to rape or incest:
“For all the symbolic importance of the House of Representatives’ move to restore the Federal financing of abortions for poor women when the pregnancy resulted from incest or rape, the practical effect would likely be very limited.
Indeed, in a 1987 survey by the Alan Guttmacher Institute in which abortion patients were asked why they were having an abortion, only 1 percent of the 1,900 women questioned named rape or incest. And 95 percent of those who mentioned rape or incest named other reasons as well for deciding to abort, the institute said.
In a separate 1979 analysis, when federally financed abortions were available in cases of rape or incest or where the pregnancy threatened the woman’s life or physical health, the institute said that a total of 3,675 women had abortions paid for by Federal money. But the institute said that it knew which category qualified for only 2,444 of the women, and of these, 72 were eligible because of rape or incest.”
So the 1987 study found 1% of abortions were due to rape, while the 1979 study found that about 3% of abortions were due to rape (72 out of 2,444).
”The 1 percent number from the 1987 survey is really the best we have on abortions because of rape or incest,” said Susan Tew, a spokeswoman for the institute. ”And there is no good hard data on how many pregnancies, over all, result from rape or incest.” #1.6 Million Abortions a Year Douglas Johnson legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, said that while estimates vary, ”I don’t think there is any evidence for a number higher than 1 percent.”
Again, the Times piece is from 1989 and the two studies it mentions were from 1987 and 1979, but I’m sure the percent of abortions due to rape isn’t much different today. It’s just not one of those statistics that’s going to fluctuate significantly over time. The article cited two studies conducted eight years apart and both studies found that a very, very small percentage of abortions were due to rape.
In fact, if anything, the percentage of abortions due to rape is probably lower today than it was in 1989 given that rapes are less common today than they were in 1989. Contrary to the leftwing myth of the rise of “Rape Culture,” the rape rate in this country has declined significantly over the past 30 years. Trigger warning for feminists:
I’ll bet your average, brainwashed American would be surprised by this chart.
So, in 1989, right around the rape peak in this country, only 1% of the abortions performed were due to rape.
But still lots of people are brainwashed to believe that rape is so common and widespread that each year hundreds of thousands–if not millions–of women need to get abortions due to being raped.
In 2017, the most recent year for which we have crime data available, there were 99,856 (call it a clean 100k) rapes in the US, a country of 325 million people. The country is 50% female, so that means there are over 170 million women and only about 100,000 were raped. That comes out to about 0.00058% of women having been raped in 2017.
There were about 900,000 abortions performed in America last year, meaning it’s not even mathematically possible for abortions due to rape to represent a significant portion of the total abortions even if every single rape resulted in a pregnancy.
But of course this is not the case: the National Institute of Health estimates that about 5% of rapes result in pregnancy. This means that of the 100k rapes in America in 2017, only 5,000 of them resulted in a pregnancy, meaning a maximum of 5,000 out of the 900,000 total abortions that year could have been due to rape. That’s less than half of 1%.
Even if you counter and say, “But rape is unreported!” that still doesn’t change much. We can quadruple the number of rapes to 400,000 and it’s still not anywhere close to signifying a nation with a “Rape Culture” epidemic on its hands. That’s still only 0.0023% of women. And if we similarly quadruple the official number of rapes that resulted in pregnancies, 5,000, we still only have 20,000 nationwide–still a far cry from 900,000 abortions nationwide. As a percentage, it would be 2.2% of total abortions–and, again, that’s only after we agree to quadruple the official number of rapes in this country purely out of courtesy to our opponents in this extremely fact-based debate (lol).
So we’re not going to allow the debate to be reframed over the tiny minority of abortions.
We’re debating murder-for-convenience–the overwhelming majority of abortions.
I’m sorry if that debate is too triggering, or if it causes too much cognitive dissonance, but that’s not my problem.
Abortion activists need to stop pretending they’re mainly just looking out for women who were raped. Abortion activists need to own their position and own it honestly: they support murder-for-convenience.
Their main priority is not women who were raped; it’s women who want to sleep around without any consequences. That’s what abortion is all about.
They know they’re the ones taking the extreme, unreasonable position, so what they try to do is dishonestly reframe the debate so that you become the one taking the extreme, unreasonable position: “You don’t think women who are raped should be able to have an abortion?! You’re so extreme and unreasonable!!”
Not gonna happen. Not here, at least.
At this site we will not even go there.
Learn and memorize the figures above if you must, but remember that the strongest debaters do not allow the opposition to frame the debate. They do not fight on hostile turf. And also keep in mind that the other side doesn’t debate; it demonizes.
Facts ultimately will not matter to these brainwashed people because they’ve already been won over by the “WOMEN’S BODIES, WOMEN’S CHOICE” emotional propaganda. You can’t use facts to overturn emotional conviction.
So that’s why my official policy is total refusal to discuss the “What about abortions that result in rape?” aspect of it.
Nope. Sorry. Not relevant. Try again.
We will keep the abortion debate firmly centered on the question of whether or not it should be okay to murder babies in order to allow women to continue being slutty.