I’m not interested in splitting heirs as far as terminology is concerned, I looked in miri - would “potentially procreative act” suit your sense better? I’m willing to use that, even though it’s slightly more vague. While you’re “educating” people on what rape is, you might want to send a letter to :
MedTerms, who defines rape as: “Forced sexual intercourse; sexual assault; sexual intercourse between an adult and a minor…”
legal-dictionary.com says “Rape is the commission of unlawful sexual intercourse or unlawful sexual intrusion.”
Merriam-Webster says: “*unlawful sexual activity *and usually sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury”
I understand that rape is a tragic subject and difficult to talk about, as most of us are either victims or have loved ones who have been victims of rape. still, I’d rather this thread be about the subject in the OP (morality of contraception and how it applies to rapist rape victim) and not squabling over definitions.
I think a point here is that rape is not like consensual sex, even though the same type of event is “physically” occurring. The mindset of the offender is wanting to do something bad to the victim, and the victim is forced to endure it in a state of numbness/fear/horror which is not how people act when they are having consensual sex.
It is possible for people to use sex for reasons that are not sexual at all but rather involve intimidation. “Putting the victim in his/her place.”
I think these definitions do matter because as far as I know, the Church’s position on contraception relates to consensual sex during marriage. Since rape is not consensual sex and not usually within marriage (although that can happen) - then I think Humanae Vitae is irrelevant to rape and contraception. Unless they specifically discussed rape in there, and I have never read it. It’s tempting to say that those conclusions such as being open to life can be extrapolated to rape but unless they say so specifically, I wouldn’t be sure about that. I would think the Church would also consider harm to the victim from lack of contraception.
Complicating all this is the use of rape in wartime, which another poster addressed. Whatever the Church says about rape needs to cover not “only” what happens to individual victims in peacetime, but large numbers of victims in wartime. And from what I understand, raping large numbers of women and children is one way enemies show their strength in victory, and it can also be used for “ethnic cleansing” as in Bosnia. One of the worst incidents of mass rape happened in Berlin and other parts of Germany in 1945 at the end of WW2 as the Russians took possession of the city.
When this happens, large numbers of women can get pregnant and that can destabilize a society. In Germany in 1945, about 10% of the female victims committed suicide. A lot of people got pregnant.
This is from wikipedia:
At the end of World War II, Red Army soldiers are estimated to have raped around 2,000,000 German women and girls.[78][79] Norman Naimark writes in “The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949.” that although the exact number of women and girls who were raped by members of the Red Army in the months preceding and years following the capitulation will never be known, their numbers are likely in the hundreds of thousands, quite possibly as high as the 2,000,000 victims estimate made by Barbara Johr, in “Befreier und Befreite”. Many of these victims were raped repeatedly. Antony Beevor estimates that up to half the victims were victims of group rapes. Naimark states that not only did each victim have to carry the trauma with her for the rest of her days, it inflicted a massive collective trauma on the East German nation. Naimark concludes “The social psychology of women and men in the soviet zone of occupation was marked by the crime of rape from the first days of occupation, through the founding of the GDR in the fall of 1949, until - one could argue - the present.”[80] German women who became pregnant after being raped by Soviet soldiers in World War II were invariably denied abortion to further humiliate them as to carry an unwanted child.[citation needed] As a result, according to the book Berlin: The Downfall, 1945 by Antony Beevor, some 90% of raped Berlin women in 1945 had venereal diseases as results of these consequential rapes and 3.7% of all children born in Germany from 1945 to 1946 had Russian fathers. The history behind this particular rape of the German women by the Soviet troops was considered a taboo topic until 1992. (See also Red Army atrocities.)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_rape#Europe
It seems to me that whatever the Church says about rape and contraception needs to cover mass/war rape as well as rape of individuals. Since the Church (although it has the just war theory) tends to prefer societies that are stable and at peace, I would think in this case contraception might be allowed because it might slightly lessen widespread instability. And in that case I would think the same conclusion would follow for individuals.
But I really have no idea on what the Church teaches about this. I just believe that they would have to take the full ugliness of rape into account, including that it is used as a wartime weapon (today in the Sudan) and also that they would realize rape is not consensual sex so their conclusions about consensual sex and contraception do not apply in this case.
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