“A GOP state lawmaker who recently gave an impassioned speech about being raped as a 16 year old says she feels attacked after a Republican colleague passed out literature describing rape as a ‘misdeed of the parent’ that doesn’t justify having an abortion,” according to the Charlotte Observer. When confronted, state Rep. Josiah Magnuson “said he wouldn’t back down from his position.”
Magnuson didn’t write the literature; it came from a group calling itself “Personhood SC,” which wants an outright abortion ban with no exceptions. Such a law, of course, is unconstitutional under Roe v. Wade — as is the fetal heartbeat bill passed by South Carolina’s legislature and signed by its governor this week. (Similar bills passed in other states have been overturned by the courts.
The literature reads, “It is a twisted logic that would kill the unborn child for the misdeed of the parent.” What kind of twisted people think a woman commits a “misdeed” by being raped? Well, Rep. Josiah Magnuson, for one. Read the story here.
Photo: I’ll bet Rep. Josiah Magnuson, right, has never been raped.
Let’s consider what happens when a woman becomes pregnant as a result of being raped. She’s got three choices: Get an abortion, give it up for adoption, or raise it as her own, in ascending order of difficulty. Now let’s suppose she gives it up for adoption, the child grows up, and someday learns his mother didn’t want him because he came into the world as a product of her being raped? How would you like to be that child? I guess someone might argue, “better than being dead,” but what is death to an organism that never knew it existed? Just another question with no answer in the extremely difficult issue of abortion. People have differing opinions. But sometimes answering such questions in favor of life requires completely disregarding the well-being of the woman, and do we really want to do that in any and all circumstances? A world without gray areas is one that doesn’t need exceptions. This is not such a world.