Ready access to a safe abortion allows a woman who keeps a child conceived in rape to feel that she is making a decision rather than having the decision forced upon her. Even opponents of reproductive choice often allow for a “rape exception.” Raped women require unfettered independence in this arena: to abort or carry to term; to keep the child or give him up for adoption. Women who opt to raise such children, like parents of disabled children, choose the child over his or her challenging identity. They and their children may struggle with societal condemnation.
Many women keep children conceived in rape because they have no access to abortion, because of religious beliefs, or because of a controlling partner, husband, or parent. I also met women who completed their pregnancies because deep self-examination led them to that decision. I met women who described keeping their pregnancies as a mute reenactment of the forced passivity they had experienced in rape. Some said their children felt like evidence—as if to abort them would be a denial of the event that produced them. Because the option to terminate any pregnancy is strongly associated with feminism, many of these women found their only support in the antiabortion movement and got saddled with a moral discourse to which they did not necessarily subscribe. Many women who wished to keep children conceived in rape said they felt intense social pressure to abort.
Pregnancy following rape is a double crisis. “Pregnancy after rape implies the nightmare not only of remembering the assault but also of giving it life inside her being,” said Ana Milena Gil, a psychologist working in Bogotá, Colombia. “By violating her body as a place of identity and autonomy, pregnancy resulting from rape creates a circle of pain. If rape hurts, damages, breaks women, pregnancy traps them. Living with the violence in your womb means having the attacker inside you.”
An infant conceived in rape unites the genetics of the mother with those of her assailant. For some women, the rape-engendered fetus represents the unwelcome conquest of her body by an alien being; for others, it seems to be an extension of herself. In an article in U.S. News & World Report, one otherwise antiabortion woman counsels her sister, pregnant through rape, “If someone shot you, would you walk around with a bullet inside of you?” But another woman in identical circumstances said, “The baby was innocent. A victim like I was.” It is imperative to remove a “bullet” from your person; it is likewise essential not to deprive an “innocent child” of life. The language used in these contexts implies moral values. The antiabortion feminist Joan Kemp writes, “It is significant that a child conceived in rape is more often called ‘the rapist’s child’ than ‘the rape victim’s child.’ In what sense can a rapist possibly be considered the ‘father of this child’?” Language can be spun to dictate the “reasonable” course of action. A woman raped by a military guard is said by Kemp to have “concluded that the child was hers; that to reject the baby was to succumb to patriarchal attitudes.” In this framing, the figurative bullet lodged in the mother is transformed into her center of power.
Some women experience attachment and revulsion in rapid alternation. In other instances, an initial hatred can give way to love—sometimes when the movement of the fetus is first felt, sometimes not until the child has matured into an adult. Women who have grown to love such children are often outspoken critics of abortion. Kay Zibolsky, founder of the antiabortion Life After Assault League, explained of her own pregnancy at sixteen, “The baby was part of my healing process. When she started to move in me, I looked at her as part of me, not him.” Similarly, Kathleen DeZeeuw tried to deny that she had become pregnant following her attack, wearing girdles to conceal the changes in her body and attempting to self-induce miscarriage, but once the fetus began to kick and move, she said, “I began to realize that this little life inside me was struggling, too. Somehow, my heart changed. I was no longer thinking of the baby as the rapist’s.” Sharon Bailey said, “Basically my feelings were ‘It’s just you and me, kid.’ I considered us both to be victims.”
Knowing that your child had no part in violating you, however, is different from feeling that your child is untainted. “The first time I held him,” Kathleen DeZeeuw admitted, “I was instantly reminded of his conception. There were many times that I had terrible feelings of hatred toward him. The laughter of my little boy often reminded me of the hideous laughter of this guy as he had raped me. I took it out on my son.” Another woman reported despairingly, “I had tried to convince myself that the rape never happened. Then I would look at her and realize, yes, it must have happened.” Padmasayee Papineni, who has studied women pregnant through rape, wrote, “Rape survivors have a much greater fear about intimacy, less comfort with closeness, and more fear of abandonment. Feelings of rejection by the mother towards the infant can lead to a wide range of psychological consequences in the child. ‘The children constantly reminded mothers of the horrors of rape, and that inevitably influenced mutual relations.’”
• • •
One August day in 1975, Brenda Henriques left her home in the projects in Queens to pick up her paycheck for working as an urban summer-camp counselor. She had tied the front tails of her shirt to show off her tanned belly in defiance of her mother, Lourdes. She got off the subway and was passing a parked cab when its door swung open and a man pulled her inside. “It was just so fast. I was on the floor. There was that hump in the middle of the car floor. So my butt was up on the hump and my face was down on the floor.” The driver came into the backseat, and the two men raped her in sequence, then handed her jeans to her and pushed her back into the street with blood running down her legs.
Back home, she took a long shower and didn’t say a word about what had happened. “Mom warned me about my shirt and I didn’t listen, and look what happened,” she said. “So I blamed myself. I felt like everybody knew. It was like I had a sign on me: ‘Not a virgin anymore’ or ‘Rape victim: asked for it.’” When she missed her first period, she told her best friend, and they snuck out during recess and went to Planned Parenthood for a pregnancy test. When she called in for the result later and found it was positive, she collapsed in the phone booth, crying. At the time, abortion was legal for a sixteen-year-old without parental consent, but she “didn’t think that an abortion would be a lie I could get away with.” She told her boyfriend first, and he said he never wanted to see her again. Then she broke the news to her parents. Her father, Vicente, said, “Are you sure that’s what happened? Why didn’t you go to the police?” Years later, she shuddered. “Why, why, the whys came,” she said. “I said, ‘Mommy, I was wearing the shirt you told me not to wear.’ And my mother says, ‘You could be standing there naked on that corner, and no one would ever have a right to do that.’ I cried with relief.”
Still, they wanted to keep the pregnancy secret. Her Catholic father wanted her to go to stay with relatives in Puerto Rico and give the baby for adoption. Her grandmother told everybody that Brenda had secretly been married and her husband was in the military. The High School of Performing Arts wanted her to withdraw from classes; one of her friends circulated a petition, after which the school administration backed down, but moved her to a less visible place in the orchestra. Brenda felt she had to be her baby’s champion.
Brenda gave birth the last week of her junior year. She wanted to name her daughter after her paternal grandmother, but her father said, “I don’t want my mother’s name on that baby.” She said, “I wanted her to have a crowning name that she wouldn’t be ashamed of. I went through the Bible, and Rebecca means ‘captivating,’ and that just clicked.” When Brenda’s father saw the baby, he had a change of heart and wrote Brenda a card that said, “Thank you for giving me my first granddaughter.”
Brenda slid into a postpartum depression. “Partly I guess it was biology,” she said, “but partly it was that all my friends were off having a fun summer vacation and I was home with this baby.” Her family doctor encouraged her to seek counseling. Even with a woman psychiatrist, it took Brenda a couple of months to describe the rape itself
, upon which the therapist asked, “At any point, did it feel good? Did you enjoy it?” Brenda walked out and has never seen a therapist again. Vicente was a car mechanic and Lourdes was a nurse; Brenda’s ambition was to be a doctor, but with an infant at home she couldn’t reach so far. “So I volunteered for the ambulance corps,” she said. “I would go into the training class dragging my daughter and put her in one of those little portable playpens, and that’s how I got my EMT.” Brenda loved working the ambulance and eventually became a qualified paramedic.
I asked Brenda whether her anger at the rapists had ever coalesced around Rebecca. “Never that,” she said. “I look at her, I see me; I don’t see the other person at all. I wasn’t going to take her life away before she was born, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to take her life away afterwards.” But she was trying to process the rape. She became promiscuous for a few years, until she met a guy named Chip Hofstadter, who owned a fish store in Queens. They married eight months later, when Rebecca was four, because Brenda needed a way out of her parents’ apartment, and Chip was willing to be a father to Rebecca. They had two more children, and all three grew up believing that Chip was their father.
Brenda and Chip separated when Rebecca was fifteen, and one of Brenda’s subsequent boyfriends raped Rebecca. Brenda decided it was time to tell Rebecca about her own rape. “It wasn’t good for her to live with lies anymore,” she explained to me. Rebecca was furious and grew increasingly rebellious. She became pregnant by her first boyfriend, and Brenda became a grandmother at thirty-five. Two years later, Rebecca had another child by another father. When Rebecca became pregnant with her third, by yet another man, Brenda took her for an abortion, saying, “You’re ruining your life, and I can’t let you do this. I’ll probably burn in hell for it, but there comes a time when I have to step in.” Rebecca eventually joined the air force.
When I first met Brenda, Rebecca was stationed in Iraq, and Brenda was raising Rebecca’s two children. “My grandchildren are my heartbeat,” Brenda said. “I didn’t think that I could love like that, and I didn’t love like that with my own children—maybe I was too young, maybe the rape. But when I felt that love, I had to let the rape go. I’ve asked myself, ‘If I ever saw my attackers in the street, would I recognize them?’ The shadowy faces I visualize could be anyone. I depersonalized it. The rape was there, but it was an act, not people. All I know is I have something that these people will never know. Never know that they have a beautiful daughter. Never know that they have beautiful grandchildren. They’ll never know. But I do. And so, as it turns out, I’m the lucky one.”
• • •
American abortion law from the colonial period through the mid-nineteenth century was predicated on the English common-law principle that life begins with quickening—the moment when the expectant woman feels the fetus moving inside her, usually at four to five months. In 1857, the newly formed American Medical Association began a crusade against abortion even prior to quickening, and laws passed in 1860 and 1880 made abortion illegal at any stage unless the mother’s life was at risk. In 1904, the journal of the AMA concluded that “pregnancy is rare after real rape,” and that, regardless, the fetus’s rights trumped the mother’s as “the enormity of the crime of rape does not justify murder.”
The 1930s saw a rise in illegal abortions as the Great Depression made large families harder to sustain. Many women died as a result of backroom operations by untrained practitioners. In 1936, Frederick J. Taussig, an influential physician, sought to make abortion available to women who “deserved” it without aiding those who might “abuse” the right, worrying that abortions for unmarried women or widows would result in a “lowering of the moral tone.” He proposed a law, never implemented but highly influential, that would permit abortions for rape victims, mentally retarded women, girls under sixteen, and any “poorly nourished woman with a large family whose external conditions make the pregnancy and the subsequent care of the child a serious burden.” In 1938, a physician was put on trial in England for performing an abortion on a fourteen-year-old rape victim, and his acquittal reflected a populist movement to liberalize the right to abortion, especially for rape victims. The trial was widely covered in the United States and led to open discussion of abortion.
In 1939, the first US Hospital Abortion Committee was formed to determine case-by-case eligibility, and by the 1950s, such committees were ubiquitous. They approved only “therapeutic” abortions: those intended to preserve the mother’s health or to avoid the birth of a child with significant disabilities. Increasingly, however, they accepted the recommendations of psychiatrists who stated that a patient’s pregnancy was endangering her mental health. Well-connected women could obtain psychiatric diagnoses fairly easily, but rape victims who could not pay a psychiatrist to vouch for their mental frailty had to show that they were nearly deranged. Some were diagnosed as licentious and had to consent to sterilization. So, contrary to Taussig’s proposal, abortions became the province of the privileged. Here is a typical caseworker report about a woman raped in the postwar era: “She became a passive object and could not say ‘no.’ Here we see a girl who having lost parental love, continues to search for love and her primary motivation became centered in getting her dependent needs met.” The clear implication is that mentally stable women do not get raped.
In 1959, the American Law Institute (ALI) proposed legalizing abortion if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest, the fetus had severe abnormalities, or the mother’s health was at risk. In 1960, Illinois made abortion legal in cases of rape, and over the next decade, a dozen states passed laws based on the ALI model. Nonetheless, the standard treatment in most states for unwed women who had been raped was to send them to maternity homes, where they were encouraged to surrender their children for adoption. They were told this would be better for the baby than a life of shame with an unwed mother. Women who wanted to abort were considered murderous; women who wanted to keep their children, selfish. Coerced relinquishments were common. Rickie Solinger, who has studied these surrenders, describes Kathleen Leahy Koch, date-raped in 1969, who complained that she was treated like a criminal, saying, “I was just someone who had to have a baby for some worthy family. It was completely dehumanizing.” Another woman, Kay Ball, raped and pregnant in 1971, attempted suicide after surrendering her baby; she said, “I was so ashamed and beaten down emotionally and mentally that I just wanted to end it all.”
In 1973, the Supreme Court affirmed a woman’s right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade. In 1976, the Hyde Amendment cut off Medicaid funding for abortion except when the mother’s health was at risk, and not until 1993 was a further exception made for women pregnant through rape or incest. Since 1973, the issue of rape has arisen in every legislative attempt to curtail or strengthen the freedoms established under Roe v. Wade. While abortion of fetuses with disabilities is often constructed as saving the putative child from suffering, the rape exception is held to be about saving the mother. By the late 1980s, polls showed that while half of Americans opposed abortions for most women, only a small percentage opposed abortion for rape and incest victims. A number of abortion bans without rape exceptions were struck down. In 1990, Idaho governor Cecil D. Andrus, who opposed abortion in most contexts, vetoed a ban because under it a rape survivor seeking an abortion “ceases to be the victim and becomes a criminal.” In some instances, abortion opponents have agreed to rape exceptions on grounds that the pregnant women are “innocent”—unlike those who become pregnant because of their untrammeled passions.
The antiabortion movement argues that an unborn child is innocent even in cases of rape. One advocate wrote, “It would be wrong to deprive the child of his unalienable right to life and the due process of the law because of the sins of his father. Two wrongs do not make a right.” The mother of a rape-conceived child said, “My child is not the exception that can be tossed away. There would be no one who could look her in the eyes and believe that she doesn’t deserve life due
to the choice of a man we never even knew.” Some believe that pregnancy is a manifestation of God’s will, quoting Jeremiah 1:5, which says, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.” This passage is taken to mean that life exists even before conception. Many hard-line antiabortion activists claim to support the best interests of the mother, taking the position that there can be no feeling of empowerment in a decision to abort. J. C. Willke, founder of the International Right to Life Federation, said, “The woman has been subjected to an ugly trauma. Should we now ask her to be a party to a second violent act—that of abortion?” Rebecca Kiessling’s pamphlet “Conceived in Rape: A Story of Hope” includes the assertion, “I am not a product of rape, but a child of God.” A blogger wrote in sarcastic response, “Rape isn’t abuse! It is another form of the immaculate conception!”
As with all contentious public issues, both sides look to selective statistics and dramatic personal stories to bolster their positions. The crucial difference is that the pro-choice movement is not, as Willke suggests, “asking” a woman to abort, but the “right-to-life” movement is attempting to force all pregnant rape victims to carry their fetuses to term. The British psychoanalyst Joan Raphael-Leff writes that a rape-conceived fetus may remain “an internal foreigner, barely tolerated or in constant danger of expulsion, and the baby will emerge part-stranger, likely to be ostracized or punished.” One rape survivor, in testimony before the Louisiana Senate Committee on Health and Welfare, likened her son to “a living, breathing torture mechanism that replayed in my mind over and over the rape.” Another described mothering a rape-conceived son as “entrapment beyond description” and felt that “the child was cursed from birth”; her son manifested severe psychological challenges and was ultimately removed from the family by social services.
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