Thus, in the case of rape, the mother would be
presumed to be psychologically in extremis, and society would decline to
punish her for seeking an abortion.
That might be a basis for mitigation. It would not, I think be a basis for automatic right to abortion. If it were, there would be a huge temptation for women who wanted abortions to claim that they were raped. The issues of date rape and marital rape are already murky. If you add in that a woman who had sex on a date and got pregnant could only get an abortion if she claimed that the sex act was rape and not consensual, you open, IMO, a huge can of worms.
Particularly given the decision in a case where the woman on a date did NOT say she didn't want to have sex, in fact, initially consented, then just said in the course of the act "I need to go home," not "stop" or "no more" "pull out now" or anything else definitive, just "I need to go home," and the Court interpreted that statement, after the fact, as not meaning "I need to go home sometime" but "I need to go home now and you need to withdraw this second and let me go home" and convicted him of rape. And of course you have the view of some radical feminists that EVERY sex act between a man and woman is in fact rape, even those apparently consensual sex acts occuring between married people.
So if you pass a law saying that a woman can't get an abortion unless she charges the guy with rape, well, Pandora's Box isn't the beginning of it. |
