Editor, Daily Nexus,

I leafed through the advertising supplement in the Feb. 27 Daily Nexus issue to find out about this “Silent Epidemic,” which apparently caused the people on the cover to walk through a subway train with masks protecting them from airborne threats.

It turns out that aspect of this epidemic is the right of rape victims to obtain an abortion. The supplement provided by humanlife.org claimed that women can experience emotions of “guilt, depression, feelings of being ‘dirty'” after rape and also after having an abortion.

One of the most common feelings of rape victims is intense helplessness and lack of control over their own bodies. And then we, as a society, have the audacity to tell these women that we will decide what they can do with what is left of them?

Abortion should not be a primary tool of birth control, nor should it be abused. Women do not want abortions. Given the choice, almost every woman would choose a birth control pill or, in rare cases, the morning after pill. If we want to decrease abortion, we need to actively help women to obtain these rather than publishing advertising supplements filled with rhetoric telling women that the best choice is to accept what life brings and be a single mother.

The supplement seemed to suggest that rape victims are re-victimized through abortion. Legal abortion is not strapping unwilling rape victims to tables and yanking babies out of them. It is giving them the choice to control what happens to them in the future, now that their pasts have been robbed.

One of the most common feelings of rape victims is intense helplessness and lack of control over their own bodies. And then we, as a society, have the audacity to tell these women that we will decide what they can do with what is left of them?

Print