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This is always a tough subject to talk about, mainly because there is so much emotional investment in it.

Those who have never experienced being pregnant from rape (or rape in general) do not understand the pain those people went through, and they never really will. It's something you can only fully understand if you've experienced it (like so many painful things in this world).

But let's step back for a moment and just look at some general principles of the Catholic faith.

1. Reciprocity. Do unto others as they do unto you. This was a general principle of many cultures, including the Jews. It's the whole eye for an eye idea. However, Christ taught us to turn the other cheek, to be kind to our enemies, and not strike back when we are wronged, but to forgive.

2. Protect the innocent. Justice is a very strong principle of Christianity, and we know that it is not just to punish someone for a crime they did not commit.

3. Sin is sin, and there is no excuse for it. Of course, there are venial and mortal sins, and there are things that will drop mortal sins down to the level of venial sins, but it is still a sin.



Now, let's look at the situation where a person has been raped and impregnated.

1. The first step is not to let that violent action destroy you and the good person that you are. No matter what others do to harm us, we still have the calling and the duty to be Christ-like people. That's not easy. It requires sacrifice and hard work and sometimes a lot of suffering. If a person isn't prepared to endure all of that, they need to ask themselves why they are Catholic, because you cannot be a true follower of Christ without being willing to sacrifice yourself for others. Whenever you ask yourself why you are choosing such a hard path, no matter what that hard path is, one of two things will happen.
A. You'll realize that there is no reason to follow that path, and you'll choose something easier.
B. You'll realize that the rewards at the end of that path far outweigh what we pay for them.
Now, each person has to answer why they follow the difficult path for themselves, but for me, the reason was simply that the world becomes a better place. People are better, I am better, and that just gives all the more glory to God.

2. The fetus has not done anything wrong. I've never understood why people who are morally against abortion in all other situations feel that it would be any more moral in the situation of rape. Punish the rapist, not his child. The child has done nothing, so why is it suddenly morally acceptable to destroy it?

3. Two wrongs don't make a right. This is a principle we all learn from the time we're small children. You can't make something right by doing something wrong. You can push things under the rug and forget about them, and honestly, that may be the only way some people feel they can get through these kinds of situations.

And I know I have no right to tell anyone what they can or cannot handle, but I would like to throw out just this one thought. In my experience, people are always a lot stronger than they think they are. Terrible things happen to people, but they cope, and they get through it. It's not easy, not by a long shot, and those terrible things are never completely behind them. A piece of it always lingers. But it is up to each person to decide what to do with that piece, to decide whether to let it define who they are, or to let it become a part of who they want to be.

I know several rape victims, and none of them will ever be the same person they were before that incident, but some of them have been able to use that terrible experience as something positive. One of my friends talked to a room full of men and women, some who had been raped, and many who hadn't about what happened to her, giving strength and hope to those who were still coping with what had been done to them, and using that experience to motivate herself and others to actually doing something to help keep people safer from those situations.

The thing is, a rape victim can never undo what has been done to them, as much as they want to. When there's a pregnancy involved, the same is true. One can never undo being pregnant. Abortion gives the illusion of undoing it, but that's all it is: an illusion.

If a person knows that, then the next step is asking themselves what path they want to take next: the hard one or the easy one. In these situations, where the hard path is so incredibly hard, I would not begrudge anyone taking the easy path. However, we have to remember that God is always calling us towards that path that, as hard as it may be, glorifies him and all his works.

So will that be the path that takes the life of an innocent being for the crimes of their father, or will that be the path of sacrifice that allows a child to be born and have the opportunity for a wonderful life?





On an ending note, I would like to recognize the fact that, as someone who has fortunately never been raped, let alone gotten pregnant from rape, I can't even begin to understand how difficult this situation would be for those people. The above is what I think I would do now, but I have no idea what I would really do after experiencing something so traumatic.

I don't mean to make anyone who has been in a situation like this feel bad about a choice they made, or even just thought about making. We all make choices that we think are right at the time and realize they're mistakes later. And just as often, we make decisions that we think are the right decisions to our dying day, no matter who tells us we're wrong. God gave you a brain and a heart, and he speaks to you always. As long as you listen to him, trying to discern with your mind, heart, and your conscience what is the right step for you, I don't think anyone has call to make you feel bad for doing something you believed was right (as long as you are, in fact, listening to your mind and your heart and God).

This in my opinion is not a tough answer to make. The Catholic Church says no and agrees that any form of abortion is wrong. The points you made about the stress are true but you know what no one dies from that stress and hormonal changes. Did you die during puberty I think not. Granted the stresses might be greater but are they that much greater than a woman who is married and is having her first child? As for the horror and what not what are you really saying that the child will be a constant reminder of that man. No not at all. You are putting the blame on an innocent person. Rape is a terrible thing but the blame is not on the child but on the person who did the raping. As for the stress of adoption and the labor those are stressful(although giving birth is something that is just natural whether married or not). Adoption in the long run will make you and any other person that has an illegitmate child feel better in the end. So many woman who make the mistake of having an abortion are scarred for the rest of their lives. In fact it brings more stress on the mother than adoption, hormonal changes, as well as child birth. Also abortions are more dangerous than actual birth. They can cause inflammation of the cervix which can lead to Pelvic Inflammatory Disease which can lead to Cervical Cancer. Abortions can also cause infertility. So abortion is more dangerous than actual child birth(they just don't tell you that). So in a nut shell abortion is not circumstancial and for all of you that say well what about etopic pregnancy and mothers who might die if the child isn't removed. Those are not considered abortions as the intent is different. In those cases the mother's life is in danger and comes first in abortions the mother's life is not in danger. The only thing in those cases are their reputation and their responsibilities and freedoms.

now in relation to the abortion-rape issue, everything rests on whether or not the fetus is a person (no one disputes the humanity of the fetus, but some claim that humanity does not imply personhood) The Church teaches that all humans are persons. for this reason we must ct with love towards them regardless of the situation. they were not responsible in any way for the rape, so to think that their lives are on the line for something they didn't do demands that we have some pity for them. this pity then turns us towards love, since through pity we marvel at the innocense of the fetus, and we ought to love all things which are innocent.

I would like to make one comment about orphanages real quick. Well, actually, several comments, but one post.

1. It is true that being an orphan can have a negative psychological effect on people, but the way I see it, nearly everyone has something that happens to them at some point in their lives that has a negative psychological effect on them, whether that's growing up without parents, being mistreated by your parents, being mistreated by anyone you trust, suffering from one tramatic experience, etc. etc. etc. That's just life. Bad things happen, and we always carry those scars with us, no matter what the scars are from. Unless someone can show me how being an orphan is worse than any other bad thing that can happen to a child in life, I remain unconvinced that someone should just rule out adoption because the child might develop some issues because of it. That's just life. Bad things happen, we struggle with them, we're changed by them, but we move on make the most of what we have anyway.

2. Where my sister lives, there is a 6-7 year average wait time for couples who want to adopt babies. Thirty years ago, when my mom wanted to adopt a child, she had to wait two years before she got to the top of the waiting list (in which time, she had finally gotten pregnant, so she ended up not adopting anyway). To top all this off, infertility in America is increasing like crazy. This all adds up to one thing: people want babies. The children who end up getting stuck in orphanages are usually the ones who either come in as older children or have some physical or mental problems. If you have a healthy baby growing in your womb and you plan to put it up for adoption, there is an incredibly good chance that the baby will be adopted and not grow up as an orphan. (Hell, even a lot of unhealthy babies have a good chance at adoption, though admittedly, nowhere near as good as healthy babies)

3. Ok, so despite the reasons I mentioned in points 1 and 2 for adoption not necessarily being a bad thing, I also mentioned that yeah, ok, there are definitely some (or rather, a lot of) faults with our system. My problem comes in when all these people (not average jo's like you and me, but actual influential people in politics, heads of organizations, etc) complain about the adoption system in America, and how it's so bad that they would never put their own child in it, yet fail to do anything to improve the system for those children who already ARE in it. I feel that both pro-lifers and pro-choicers need to get together and fix up our system, because that is the only way to promote both allowing the child to live and giving the mother more choices. And that really is what we're going for here, right?


*end rant*

Sorry, I just have a lot of friends who have been adopted and I know a ton of people who have (or in some cases, still are) trying to adopt, so I do get frustrated with how crappy our adoption system is. Granted, it's still better than a lot of other countries . . .

This is, without a doubt, the most thoughtful, sensitive answer to the abortion/rape question that I've encountered to date.

So...what Garra said. heart

I wanted to start off by restating what I mentioned in my previous post. I am not trying to call you or anyone else out with anything I say in this post. If anything sounds unduly harsh or disapproving, I do apologize in advance, as that was certainly not my intent. This is a difficult and emotional subject, even more so for people who have had to deal with it themselves or know someone who has, and I cannot give any rock hard advice in the situation. All I can do is express my own views and ask that anyone in this situation think deeply (as I'm sure they'll do without my encouragement) on the subject, seeking to learn more about the position of the Church (and there are many who can explain it much better than I), more about their own beliefs, and most of all seek God's guidance. If people do that, I will never tell them that what they did was wrong. I may not understand their decisions, but I will at least respect them.

(also, it is rather late here and I do have a fever today, so I apologize if anything doesn't make sense. If that happens, let me know what parts are confusing and I will clarify them)



I understand that rape is not a simple matter. There is so much pain and hurt that comes with all rape and much more that comes from many different individual circumstances.

But think about Jesus on the cross. His pain was not simple either. He had a crown woven from a plant with inch long thorns beaten into his head. The guards ridiculed him not just for themselves, but in front of tons of people who had gathered at Pilate's home, many of whom he probably knew.

He was flogged with whips that literally ripped layers of skin from him with hooks and pieces of glass and sharp rocks. He was beaten so badly that the bible says he barely even looked like himself.

Then he was forced to carry a large wooden beam, the instrument of his execution to the hill where he would be killed. He was paraded through the streets in front of even more people, so that all of Jerusalem knew that he was being given the death of a criminal.

When he finally got to the place he was to be crucified, he was stripped completely naked, his last shred of dignity denied him. Then he had his hands and feet nailed into the cross with nails nearly the size of railroad spikes, his flesh torn and bones crushed as the nails were driven in. Then the cross was raised, and he hung there feeling the weight of his own body crushing him and suffocating him, being forced to pull himself up on his pierced hands and feet to relieve the pressure from his chest and just be able to breathe.

On top of all that, he felt the weight of all the sins of the world crushing down upon him and heard the laughter and scorn of not just the guards, but the criminals around him. And what did he say?

"Father, forgive them."

I can't imagine the pain of rape or ever being able to forgive someone for it, but I also cannot imagine the pain Christ went through or ever managing to forgive someone for inflicting that pain.

I'm not saying that forgiveness is easy. In fact, I tried to make it clear in my post that I personally could imagine very few things more difficult than that. But as difficult as it is, as impossible as it may even seem, it is still what we are called to do.

Christ set the example for us on the cross, and it's not an easy example to live up to. It's one that we may never even achieve in our lives. However, we believe that with Christ, all things are possible. And if one truly believes that, they have to at least try. And that's really the best that anyone can hope for.



Christ died to save the world, but we also believe that he died to save each and every individual, that he would sacrifice everything for even one person. If we strive to be completely Christ-like, we too must be willing to sacrifice everything for even just one individual.

I see a very similar challenge with those looking at pregnancy from rape. Those people are called to sacrifice much of themselves for the life of another person.



Think about Mary. She too did not ask to be a mother. Though she didn't have the traumatic experience of being raped, she still could have lost so much because she said yes to carrying a child. Her future husband almost divorced her, which would have left her single and with a child. Not only would she have had no means of support, but she would have been shunned by all good Jews for becoming pregnant out of wedlock, and possibly have been stoned to death for her infidelity.

Mary chose to risk all these things because she knew it was the right thing to do. If we believe that the fetus is a child with a soul and it is wrong to destroy it, then we already have our answer. The right thing to do is to keep the baby. Whether we suffer or not for that decision, it will not change that it is the right thing to do.

Mary was the ideal disciple, the first follower of Christ and our primary example of what our role should be. One of the things that always impresses me about Mary was how much trust she put in God when she said yes to being the mother of Christ. Mary was a young woman, maybe 13 or 14, her whole life ahead of her. She was engaged to be married to a good man and life was looking great for her. Then God came to her with a plan that was definitely NOT of her choosing. It completely changed her life and brought her a lot of suffering she would otherwise never have had to experience. However, through her yes to God, she helped bring everlasting life to the world. Though we cannot hope to make quite as big of impact as that, we can strive to bring God to people through all sorts of little actions in our lives.

Imagine what keeping a child conceived through rape could bring to the world. It brings an example to all those who have been raped that it is your life and you can take back control over whatever situation you have been placed in by the rapist. A rapist forces themselves on a woman and then, if she gets pregnant, what next? Is he forcing her to have his child? Or is he forcing her to go through a painful abortion? Both options leave the rapist in control, but if a woman can say, this is not his baby, but mine, and I am not being forced to do anything. I am making a choice of my own, and I am choosing to raise a beautiful child and turn something horrible that was done to me into something wonderful I can do for someone else.

Imagine what that brings to the child! A chance at life! A chance to know and love God and all that he has created.



It is very expensive to carry a child to term and then raise them. Or at least, it can be. However, there are a lot of services available if one only knows where to look. My sister worked at a Pregnancy Crisis Center, and they gave away free pre-natal exams, free car seats, free clothing, free counseling, and a lot of other services to help out expectant mothers who otherwise would not be able to afford to have a child.



That isn't protecting the innocent, but you're trying to defend a negative action by suggesting that another negative action might happen in the future.
It's essentially saying, well they'll get hurt eventually anyway, so it's ok to hurt them now.
We cannot justify sinning now because we think that not doing that would cause us to sin in the future.

Furthermore, there are ways to try to protect those children. I know we've mentioned it before, but there is the option of adoption.



I think it's a worse sin to kill the fetus.
Again, you are trying to weigh a sin you know will happen with one that is only a possibility.
Furthermore, there are things that can be done to significantly lesson that possibility.



See, I see this as a matter of perspective. It is very difficult to conceive and bring a child to term. Doubly so if the mother is in a great amount of stress.
If the rape just happened to occur during the 36 hours in the month that the woman was ovulating, the embryo implants and grows without complications, the stress the mother's body is going through doesn't manage to abort the fetus, and the mother chooses to carry the child to term, I think there's a lot more going into that child's existence than simply one man's actions.

A child of rape does not exist just because a man decided to rape a woman. They exist for all sorts of reasons, one of the most important being the mother's love for the child. Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world where every child is created by two loving parents who care for each other and their child. That doesn't give us the right to kill every child who is not lucky enough to be born into that life.

We can't control the actions of other people. We can control our own actions.





I'm sorry, but I really have no answer for you. Every situation is different, and every person in that situation has to make their own decisions, decisions they feel are right and decisions they can live with. I can't tell you what those decisions would be for you and neither can anyone else.

However, I do think there is a difference between carrying a child to term because you believe abortion is wrong and letting yourself be drawn into abusive situations because of it.

However, I do want to clarify the difference between doing what you believe is right and doing what others want you to do. What is right, to me at least, always boils down to one thing: What action can I take that will in service of love? Marrying an abusive man who raped you? Not in the service of love. Allowing a child to have a chance at life? well where do you think that would fall?



As I said before, the rapist, in these cases, forces a woman to be pregnant. That's it. As much as we all hate being forced onto difficult paths, it's something that happens quite frequently in life.

For example, I didn't want to be forced to deal with dizzy spells every day for the rest of my life.

I have a friend with a collagen disorder who will be forced to spend the rest of her life on pain medication and systematically replace most of the joints in her body as she grows older.

Neither of us chose to be in these conditions. We both would have loved for life to be easier for us, but we were forced down the hard path. There's nothing we can do about that.

But there is something we can do. We can choose where to go from here.

A rapist does not force a woman to have a baby, at least not in this day and age. He may force the woman to be pregnant in some cases, but that's it. It is now up to the woman to decide where to go from there. They've already had something difficult forced upon them. Now it's time to decide what path they want to CHOOSE to take. At this point, your actions are your own. They are not merely a consequence of someone else's actions.



I have to disagree with your summation of the US adoption program. It has problems, undoubtably, but I would direct you to my other post for my specific arguments why that is not a valid reason for destroying a human being.



Then I would suggest you look more into teachings on abortion from the Church. You may not agree with them, and that's totally up to you, but I would still encourage it simply for the reason that, by your arguments here, it would seem that you do not find abortion to be a sin at all.

If that's the case, then the answer to whether abortion is wrong in cases of rape would be very simple. No. It isn't.

However, if you do see abortion as a sin, I just can't see any way of making it not a sin because of the circumstances of conception.

We view it as sinful because we view the fetus as an actual person with a soul and life of its own. To kill it is therefore akin to murder, which we all know is a sin.

Now, I don't really want to get into the discussion of whether abortion is ok or not in general in this thread (as that's not what we really came here to talk about), but I do think it's important to establish what your base-line belief about the morality of abortion is.

Is the fetus a person or not? If it is, then abortion is murder.
If it isn't, then abortion is simply the removal of cells from the body, which is not immoral.

The reason the Church disapproves of stem-cell research using fetuses is the same reason it would disapprove of killing a man, harvesting his organs, and giving them to 6 people who are all about to die from organ failure.

If we allow the ends to justify the means, then all sin becomes acceptable.



The fact that the child exists makes the idea of whether it should or should not have existed irrelevant. It exists. Now we deal with that.
The way you described abortion here is like it is righting a wrong. A child should not have existed, so we get rid of the child, and now everything is how it should have been. That sounds very much like an illusion to me. I don't mean to be mean here, and I'm not trying to call you out on anything. I'm just explaining how I see things, and what I'm seeing in that statement is a failure to deal with what exists and only to deal with what you wish exists.

An illusion is something that hides reality from us. The reality that abortion hides in this instance is that the child already exists. The fetus is alive and has a soul, at least that is the Church's position.



I would wholeheartedly agree with that. There is no easy path for people who have been raped, and doubly so for those who got pregnant from rape.

However, my point is that we cannot choose something just because it is easier and expect that to necessarily be the moral choice. If we want our actions to be moral, we have to look at the morality only, not which path is easier for us.



I believe I mentioned this before, but the Church does make allowances for the health of the mother, which this would fall under.

However, you are right. It's not simple. It's not even remotely simple, which is why it's such a difficult subject to discuss.