There is a lot of emotional manipulation going on in the issue, isn’t there? Politicians that have been getting themselves into trouble have done so largely through poor choice of words and failure to speak to the audience.
The main problem here is that many people see abortion NOT as the killing of an innocent child, but as a magic time machine that can go back and make that child never to have existed. Unfortunately, this is objectively not true. Abortion doesn’t “undo” a pregnancy, it kills the child. The child exists and abortion kills her. This is an injustice regardless of what crime her father committed. It is not remotely inaccurate to say that her life was a gift given to her and the world by God. God didn’t will the rape, but if a child was conceived, then He did act to bring a potential good out from the evil. Incidentally, that’s the same way Christ redeeemed us. God didn’t CAUSE Pilate and the Sanhedrin to crucify Jesus, but He did bring good from it.
The other blunder pols have made lately involves the very nature of pregnancy from rape. As any NFP practitioner knows, a woman cannot get pregnant if her cervical mucus status is not one that permits sperm mobility. While the critics are correct to angrily proclaim that a raped woman most certainly CAN become pregnant, the pols in question had a point in that it is biologically far less likely for a rape to result in pregnancy than consensual sex is. Again, anybody familiar with the anatomy knows that an aroused woman produces her own, ahem, lubrication fluid (and it takes rather a lot of arousal sometimes too!). This biological reaction can broaden the time period in which sperm can travel and fertilize an egg compared to the woman’s non-aroused cervical mucus condition. In other words, the pols understood enough about the process to be dangerous (to themselves and others). While their critics appear to know NOTHING about the subject, they nevertheless scored some major PR points. Such is politics. The lesson? Heck if I know. Maybe it’s to think through what you are about to say before you say it and to consider your audience!
