Let me make two things clear up front:
- I'd personally rather the government and other busybodies stay as much as possible out of ALL personal decisions, from health to education to the way we raise our children to the food we eat. (Inform and educate, yes; regulate, no.)
- Representative Akin's remarks about "legitimate rape" and pregnancy showed appalling ignorance, there's no doubt about that.
BUT it seems to me that we're always missing the main issue: Rape doesn't change what abortion IS. (Or is not.) Either abortion following rape compounds one assault with another, so that there are two innocent victims of the crime instead of one, or it does not. If it does not, then it makes not the slightest bit of difference whether the abortion is done on woman who has been raped or on a woman who simply does not want to be pregnant. On the other hand, if abortion does double the number of victims, then even in the case of rape it is rightly an agonizing decision, and we need to help the woman through it, not somehow think to reassure her by insisting that because she was the victim of violence, the obvious right course of action is to inflict violence on another.
