Depending on which statistical source you trust, anywhere from 1-3% of North American women who have abortions choose do so because they were raped or the victims of incest. In Canada, one hundred thousand abortions are performed annually, which means between 1,000 to 3,000 are the result of rape or incest.
The question is, are abortions for these reasons morally permissible? A couple of preliminary observations. First, some people are under the mistaken belief that the great majority of abortions are because of rape or incest. This just isn’t the case. In fact, it is rarely the case.
Second, rape and incest are terrible, terrible evils. According to the United Nations, some 24,000 women were raped in Canada in both 2001 and 2002. This doesn’t include all the rapes that were unreported or unrecorded. It also doesn’t tell us how many women are the victims of incest. These are sad, shocking, horrifying figures, and a sign of our nation’s fallenness. (In fact, Canada has one of the highest rape rates in the world.) No woman should ever be abused.
However, in cases where a woman becomes pregnant as a result of rape or incest, she should not commit another act of evil by aborting her child. If the unborn child, at any stage of pregnancy, is a living human being, a person who ought to be protected, as I argued in my last response, then abortion is to kill a defenseless child. It’s murder. And the fact is, abortion in the case of rape or incest is punishing someone—the unborn baby—who’s innocent.
Some will say, “But every time the woman looks at her child she’s going to be reminded of the violence that was done to her.” Yes, that may be so. But that doesn’t justify abortion. Imagine a woman who’s been raped, becomes pregnant, and decides to keep her baby. A week after he’s born, she realizes that he’s too painful a reminder of her assault, so she decapitates him. In such a case, we would—I hope—be appalled and condemn what she’s done. Give him up for adoption, we’d say, or go to counseling. You can’t kill your one week-old baby.
But birth doesn’t make a baby a human being. Conception does. Why is it wrong to kill a born child but not an unborn one? You could only say the latter is permissible if you assign different moral value to the unborn. Yet, biologically and theologically, that simply isn’t defensible.
I should note, too, as an aside, that contrary to popular belief, abortion is legal at every stage of pregnancy, right until birth. In fact, the baby isn’t recognized as a “person” under Canadian law until her entire body has been delivered. Yes, you read that correctly. In practice, in most Canadian provinces you won’t be able to find a doctor willing to perform an abortion after 20 weeks (though in some places you can still procure an abortion up to 24 weeks). Nevertheless, as several prominent Canadian legal cases have demonstrated, the (deliberate or accidental) death of an unborn child is not treated the same as that of a child who’s been born. Three prominent Canadian legal cases are worth searching for on the Internet: R. v. Sullivan (1991); Tremblay v. Daigle (1989); and R. v. Drummond (1996).
[Answered by Dr. Stephen Tu, Trinity Pacific Church]
