Just a thought to ponder: Do the Assemblymen believe a fetus is a life? If so, how does rape justify the taking of a life? If not, then it is my opinion that we have no right to restrict abortions. I've never understood that concession by the pro-life community.
My belief is that a fetus is a life from the moment of conception when a human sperm fertilizes a human egg to combine the chromosomes of the gametes into a living human single cell from which all future cells stem. This single cell then implants, grows, and splits into two identical cells, which grow and split into four identical cells, which grow and split into eight identical cells, which grow and split into sixteen cells that are no longer identical. Already, even within a matter of hours, the cells begin to separate themselves toward different tasks. A new person is created. To intentionally kill even the single cell is murder. If I had it my way, I'd ban all abortion except when the mother would die otherwise and ban emergency contraceptives. But, this is never going to happen. Rape does not make murder any less of a murder.
The reason why the rape exception in particular is brought up is because there a lot of people out there that will oppose abortion but stop short of agreeing that it is murder whose opinion is greatly affected by the idea of whether a woman “deserved” to get pregnant. There are also a lot of women out there who fear abortion bans with no rape exception who may be willing to support or at least not loudly oppose a ban with a rape exception. To the pro-life community, abortion is effectively legal under almost any circumstances in the US and mandated as such by Roe v. Wade. There are about 800,000 abortions in the US annually* and the pro-life community is generally willing to make any deal imaginable to reduce this number, especially considering most estimates place the percentage actually done to rape victims ~0.5%-1% depending on the study. It doesn’t make a lot of practical sense to refuse to try and stop the other 99% over this when such a huge number happen.
Stepping away from practical politics for a second and into a thought on moral principles, it is a sad day indeed that we need to discuss mass genocide in terms of “reducing the need”. Sometimes in the whirlwind of politics we tend to forget the true gravity of what our society is doing. For example, there were about 16,000 reported murders in the US last year; abortions outnumber this by a ratio of 50:1. We would need the US to remain in Iraq for about 1600^ years at the casualty rates we sustained during that war to match the number of abortions the US has in one year. In fact, we’ve aborted more in the last 39 years than the entire population of Iraq. In all wars from the American Revolution to modern day combined, we’ve lost 1.3 million American lives.^ It takes us two years to abort more than that. The numbers are just so ridiculous that we have to try every possible option to do
something. I look to but never expect to see a day when the pro-life community can start to talk about mass genocide for what it truly is instead of trying to reduce it.
All of this is in real life and I’m not sure the exact state of popular opinion on the matter in Altasia, but I will supply my vote to whatever appears the best way to, unfortunately, reduce mass genocide.
*(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_United_States)
^(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war)
