If a girl is raped and pregnant, should she keep the baby?

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as i agreed with in the post afterwards

She "should" do what she thinks best according to her ability to healthfully sustain a pregnancy and/or adequately provide for a child, and the impact they would make on her life.
Individuals tend to be far better judges of their circumstances than armchair philosopher strangers.

That's right. In addition to drugs and alcohol rapists also tend to prefer victims that are more meek and less likely to resist. I think this crap about women baiting rapists with what they wear is stupid condescending victim blaming BS because I'm sure a woman wearing a low cut V neck that is willing to rip the dude's balls off is a much more appealing target than a woman wearing a sweater that is more reluctant to do whatever it takes to defend herself and enforce her boundaries earlier on .

Last edited by AceOfSpades on 31 Jul 2011, 12:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It depends on the women though. A lot of women have rape fantasies when they have been attacked in real life. In so many situations it would be impossible to tell from rape and consensual violent ravishment fantasies, especially if she asks guys to be very rough with her and use her.

I think it's not as black and white as one would say. That's not excusing an attack, just that it might be very difficult to ascertain whether there has actually been one.

all of which my post adresses
of course you will find exceptions to anything involving humans, of course there are circumstances that can look like rape where a woman can take advantage,
or ways a rapist can hide evidence, but in the end all it argues is that one needs to remove any beurucratic and legislative hindrances to a free choice, this way no test would be needed to prove anything and as such all of what we discussed above becomes irrelevant.

all i argued was that there are actually ways that if done right can "prove" rape (in quotation because it will of course be a part of a whole case, no one looks at a single piece of evidence without anything else at all)
in a way much more consistent than simple word against word scenarios

Ideally, nobody decides on one datum. Ideally the role of the advocate is to cut through the garbage and not add to it.

"a lot"?
I think it's fair to say, "some," but there's a reason that the stereotypical S&M fetish pair has a female dominatrix. "she asked for it, it was consensual," is almost always just a rapist's lie.

You guys don't own her body. You try keeping a growing tumor inside your body for 9 months before pretending that it is moral to order these women to do it (sometimes a literal tumor, inside your mouth, so pretty). Actually, forget about the tumor, consider a tumor that reminds you that you were raped. So you constantly revive such a pretty event as getting raped everything you puke and feel like crap because of the pregnancy. Oh and when you can't even move because your body has been deformed to make way to the son of that rapist. And here's your chance to remember getting raped. Oh and here comes the feeling of guilt, maybe it is your fault and you are being punished, and that's the reason you are going to lose your teeth sooner than before you got raped.

And such great thinking that allowing her to kill the rapist would fix things. But beware of that logic. If she were to kill all the people messing up with her body without her consent you would be second in the list just after the rapist.

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Let them decide for herself, and that includes when the sex was consensual. I know that it kills you to not being able to control her decisions regarding her own body. (And you cannot really, as making abortion illegal is not going to stop it), but such is life, people do stuff you don't like.

If abortion were illegal I'd risk that too. Which is just one more argument as for why abortion should be, and should remain, legal. No woman, especially one who has already been through the trauma of rape, should have to go to such dangerous extremes to abort a fetus.

The problem with this argument is - the fetus is not her body. Even the placenta is only half the woman's body.

I'm all for women's rights, I just don't see abortion as being in the class of women's rights. I see it as a contentious life issue, such as the death penalty.

As soon as the technology is invented to safely remove a fetus/placenta complex from an unwilling host and implant it in a willing one, or an artificial uterus, then I'll reconsider a carte blanch pro-choice stance. Until then, the will of the host trumps the body of the zef.

Last edited by LKL on 02 Aug 2011, 2:13 am, edited 1 time in total.

What if the mother didn't want the baby? What if she didn't even want kids yet and wasn't even ready to be a mother? Why should she be forced to be a mother just because she was raped?

she can give the baby up for adoption and wait until she is ready to have and raise a kid? Even if we were to ban abortions for an entire year, there would still be a surplus of couples who can't have children and are looking to adopt.

i think you will find there are plenty of kids around the world in need of a loving home, it is the parents that are in short suply.

then there is the issue of countries paying special support to foster homes, meaning there is a financial incentive to have 3 kids you dont care about, is that better?
again the mental damage of the mother and child just because of circumstance, in this case i find it as much more imoral to induce suffering to this extent than to minimize it where aplicaple.
the science is there to support an embryo in the first trimester cannot experience, so where is the mercy of "christ".

You're being deterministic, here. While the foetus and the placenta might well not be the woman's body, I see that issue as entirely irrelevant. In balancing the mother's right to life, liberty and security of the person (I am using the Canadian formulation of that right, others will need to read this mutatis mutandis), against a putative right held by a being that has not yet become a person in law, there is no argument--the rights of a life in being prevail over putative rights of a life that is not yet a legal person.

But even if we were to create a legal framework in which a foetus' had a right to life, the law would still be obliged to balance those competitive interests. So even if we were to change the law to impute legal personality to a foetus, we would still not have a determination of the instant question, because the same right is being contested by both parties.

Generally speaking, in conflicting disputes, I will come down on the side that best permits both parties interests to be least infringed. That is why I set my political and legal tolerance for abortion at the limit of viability.

Prior to twenty weeks gestational age (based on current medical knowedge and practice), any right to life possessed by the foetus is moot--the death of the mother will necessarily involve the death of the foetus. The foetus cannot, I suggest, be described as having a crystalized right because the foetus cannot exercise that right independently of its physical link to its mother. (As opposed to, say, a profoundly disabled person who can still independently exercise an independent right to life with reliance upon equipment such as a respirator.)

I am not going to let people throw my Christianity in my face and tell me what to do on the basis of quote mined Bible verses or some wishy washy notion of how Christians should feel about others. That is why my compassion is conditional to the effect that if it is demanded of me then it is not provided. But as for the life of the offender, if the woman who was raped wants him dead, then the rapist should die. Too many laws protect the criminals and thereby encourage crime to continue and even abound.