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*The Newyorker*

August 29, 2012
The Legitimate Children of Rape
Posted by Andrew
Solomon<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/andrew_solomon/search?contributorName=Andrew%20Solomon>

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 [image: solomon-rape-233.jpg]

Writing in the *American Journal of Preventive Medicine*, Dr. Felicia H.
Stewart and Dr. James Trussell have estimated that there are twenty-five
thousand rape-related pregnancies each year in the United States. While
these numbers make up only a small part of this country’s annual three
million unwanted pregnancies, the numbers are still extremely high.
Nonetheless, the relationship between rape and pregnancy has been a topic
of highly politicized debate since long before Todd Akin’s comments on
“legitimate rape,” Paul Ryan’s bill with its category of “forcible rape,”
and Sharron Angle’s suggestion, two years ago, that women pregnant through
rape make “a lemon situation into lemonade.” There is a veritable war of
statistics about rape and pregnancy, and the confusion is exacerbated by
the competing agendas of the pro-choice and anti-abortion movements. It has
been argued that fear promotes ovulation, and that women who are raped have
a ten-per-cent risk of pregnancy; there are estimates of as little as one
per cent. Numbers are also skewed when they are adjusted to include or
exclude women not of reproductive age; for sodomy and other forms of rape
that cannot cause pregnancy; for rape victims who may be using oral birth
control or I.U.D.s; and for women who are raped and become or are pregnant
as a result of consensual sex with a husband or partner who is not the
rapist, before or after the rape. Women who are being abused on an ongoing
basis are particularly likely to conceive in rape. Catherine MacKinnon has
written, “Forced pregnancy is familiar, beginning in rape and proceeding
through the denial of abortions; this occurred during slavery and still
happens to women who cannot afford abortions.”

I have been researching a book, “Far from the
Tree<http://www.amazon.com/Far-From-Tree-Children-Identity/dp/0743236718/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0>,”
that deals in part with women raising children conceived in rape, and have
therefore met the living reproof to Akin’s remark. Life for these children
may be extremely difficult. One of the few groups founded to address this
population, Stigma Inc., took as its motto, “Rape survivors are the victims
… their children are the forgotten victims.”

And yet there’s a lot of history behind their experience, and that of their
mothers. Augustine saw a noble purpose in rape; while promising women that
“savage lust perpetuated against them will be punished,” he also praises
rape for keeping women humble, letting them know “whether previously they
were arrogant with regard to their virginity or over-fond of praise, or
whether they would have become proud had they not suffered violation.” The
Roman physician Galen claimed that women could not conceive in rape—could
not, in fact, conceive without an orgasm based in pleasure and consent.
Classical mythology is full of rape, usually seen as a positive event for
the rapist, who is often a god; Zeus so took Europa and Leda; Dionysus
raped Aura; Poseidon, Aethra; Apollo, Euadne. It is noteworthy that every
one of these rapes produces children. The rape of a vestal virgin by Mars
produced Romulus and Remus, who founded Rome. Romulus organized the rape of
the Sabine women to populate his new city. In much later civilizations, the
rape of the Sabines was considered a noble story; in the Renaissance, it
often graced marriage chests. The hostility such children inspired due to
their origins has also long been acknowledged. In both the ancient and the
medieval world, women who bore children conceived in rape were permitted to
let them die of exposure—although in medieval Europe a few weeks’ penance
was deemed necessary for doing so.

Historically, rape has been seen less as a violation of a woman than as a
theft from a man to whom that woman belonged, either her husband or her
father, who suffered an economic loss (a woman’s marriageability spoiled)
and an insult to his honor. There was also the problem of bastard children,
who were considered a social burden; the Athenian state, for example, was
primarily occupied with protecting bloodlines, and so treated rape and
adultery the same way. Hammurabi’s code describes rape victims as
adulterers; English law of the seventeenth century takes a similar
position. In Puritan Massachusetts, any woman pregnant through rape was
prosecuted for fornication. In the nineteenth century, the American courts
remained biased toward protecting men who might be falsely accused. In
order to prove that an encounter was a rape, the woman had to demonstrate
that she had resisted and been overcome; she usually had to show bodily
harm as evidence of her struggle; and she had somehow to prove that the man
had ejaculated inside her.

In the early and mid-twentieth century, rape remained underreported because
women feared adverse consequences if they spoke out about what had happened
to them. In 1938, Dr. Aleck Bourne 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 abortion, especially
for rape victims. The trial was widely covered in the U.S. and led to open
debate about the validity of abortion; the following year, the first
hospital abortion committee in the United States was formed, and by the
nineteen-fifties these committees were ubiquitous. Although they approved
only “therapeutic” abortions, they increasingly accepted the
recommendations of psychiatrists who said a woman’s mental health was
endangered by her pregnancy. Well-connected and well-to-do women could
obtain psychiatric diagnoses fairly easily, and so abortions became the
province of the privileged. Ordinary rape victims often had to prove that
they were nearly deranged. Some were diagnosed as licentious, and had to
consent to sterilization to obtain abortions. Here is a typical caseworker
report about a woman who had been raped in the postwar, pre-Roe 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. She took the
man’s sexual interest as love and an opportunity to be loved by somebody.

That is to say, mentally stable people are not the kind who get raped. The
emerging field of psychoanalysis did not help matters. Though Freud himself
wrote little about rape, Freudians in the early and mid-twentieth century
saw the rapist as someone suffering a perverse, uncontrolled sexual
appetite, who fed into women’s natural masochism. This position seemed to
exonerate the rapist; in 1971, the psychoanalyst Menachem Amir called rape
a “victim-motivated crime.” A rapist was the embodiment of virility, while
those who were raped were utterly abject; the aggression was deplored less
than the disenfranchisement was pitied.

Appalled at such positions, feminists of the nineteen-seventies began the
reclassification of rape as an act of violence and aggression rather than
of sexuality. Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 landmark “Against Our Will: Men,
Women, and Rape” maintained that rape had very little to do with desire and
everything to do with domination. She proposed that rape was a much more
frequent occurrence than had previously been acknowledged, that it was not
the obscure behavior of a very occasional person with severe mental illness
but rather a common result of the power differential between men and women.
She also tied the problem of rape to the issues of pregnancy, writing, “Men
began to rape women when they discovered that sexual intercourse led to
pregnancy.”

For several of the women I interviewed, the crisis was exacerbated by the
question of what rape means, by the idea that some rape is not forcible or
legitimate. Men who have gotten away with rape seldom retreat in shame or
repentance; they often play out their ghoulish exuberance by claiming their
reproductive successes. Among the women I interviewed, such men’s bids for
custody or visitation rights felt far more like acts of further aggression
than expressions of care. Nevertheless, in instances where rape cannot be
proven or charges were never filed, the threat of joint custody is real.
Many women who cannot cope with prosecuting their assailant are then left
without any proof of assault. In a time when DNA evidence can establish
biological ties scientifically, this lack of evidence as to the social
circumstances of conception can be a serious problem. Stigma Inc. had a
posting that read, “The father/rapist is thus deemed ineligible for
visitation or custody of the minor child. However, as in the case of rape
victims in general, the burden of proof that a rape took place is often
placed upon the woman who has suffered the crime. Often it comes down to a
‘he said/she said’ issue.”

The aftermath of rape is always complicated. Many victims are simply in
denial that they are pregnant in the first place: a full third of the
pregnancies resulting from rape are not discovered until the second
trimester. Any delay in detection reduces women’s options, especially
outside major urban centers, but many women struggle with the speed of the
decision; they are still recovering from being raped when they are called
on to make up their minds about an abortion. The decision of whether or not
to carry through with such a pregnancy is nearly always an ordeal that can
lead, no matter which choice is ultimately made, to depression, anxiety,
insomnia, and P.T.S.D. Rape is a permanent damage; it leaves not scars, but
open wounds. As one woman I saw said, “You can abort the child, but not the
experience.”

Even women who try to learn their child’s blamelessness can find it
desperately difficult. The British psychoanalyst Joan Raphael-Leff writes
of women bearing children conceived in rape, “The woman feels she has
growing inside her part of a hateful or distasteful Other. Unless this
feeling can be resolved, the fœtus who takes on these characteristics is
liable to 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, described her son as “a
living, breathing torture mechanism that replayed in my mind over and over
the rape.” Another woman described having a rape-conceived son as
“entrapment beyond description” and felt “the child was cursed from birth”;
the child ultimately had severe psychological challenges and was removed
from the family by social services concerned about his mental well-being.
One of the women I interviewed said, “While most mothers just go with their
natural instincts, my instincts are horrifying. It’s a constant, conscious
effort that my instincts not take over.”

The rape exception in abortion law is so much the rule that many women who
wish to keep children conceived in rape describe an intense social pressure
to abort them, and the pressure to abort can be as sinister as the
restriction of access to abortion. There can be no question that, for some
women, an abortion would be far more traumatic than having a rape-conceived
child. I read the harrowing autobiography of a girl who was put under
involuntary anesthesia to have an abortion of the pregnancy that had
occurred when her father raped her, so that her parents could keep their
reputation intact. It’s a horrifying story because the abortion clearly
constitutes yet another assault: it is about a lack of choice. But ready
access to a safe abortion facility allows a woman who keeps a child
conceived in rape to feel that she is making a conscious decision, while
having the baby because she has no choice perpetuates the trauma and is bad
for the child. Rape is, above all other things, non-volitional for the
victim, and the first thing to provide a victim is control. Raped women
require unfettered choice in this arena: to abort or to carry to term, and,
if they do carry to term, to keep the children so conceived or to give them
up for adoption. These women, like the parents of disabled children, are
choosing the child over the challenging identity attached to that child.
The key word in that sentence is “choosing.”

One sees the problem abroad, where the Helms Amendment is taken to mean
that no agency receiving U.S. funding can mention abortion even to women
who have been systematically raped as part of a genocidal campaign. The
journalist Helena Smith
wrote<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/apr/16/balkans>the story of
a woman named Mirveta, who gave birth to a child conceived in
rape in Kosovo. Mirveta was twenty years old, and illiterate; her husband
had abandoned her because of the pregnancy. “He was a healthy little boy
and Mirveta had produced him,” Smith writes. “But birth, the fifth in her
short lifetime, had not brought joy, only dread. As he was pulled from her
loins, as the nurses at Kosovo’s British-administered university hospital
handed her the baby, as the young Albanian mother took the child, she
prepared to do the deed. She cradled him to her chest, she looked into her
boy’s eyes, she stroked his face, and she snapped his neck. They say it was
a fairly clean business. Mirveta had used her bare hands. It is said that,
in tears, she handed her baby back to the nurses, holding his snapped, limp
neck. In Pristina, in her psychiatric detention cell, she has been weeping
ever since.” The aid worker taking care of Mirveta said, “Who knows? She
may have looked into the baby’s face and seen the eyes of the Serb who
raped her. She is a victim, too. Psychologically raped a second time.”

In working on my book, I went to Rwanda in 2004 to interview women who had
borne children of rape conceived during the genocide. At the end of my
interviews, I asked interviewees whether they had any questions for me, in
hopes that the reversal would help them to feel less disenfranchised in the
microcosmic world of our interview. The questions tended to be the same:
How long are you spending in the country? How many people are you
interviewing? When will your research be published? Who will read these
stories? Why are you interested in me? At the end of my final interview, I
asked the woman I was interviewing whether she had any questions. She
paused shyly for a moment. “Well,” she said, a little hesitantly. “You work
in this field of psychology.” I nodded. She took a deep breath. “Can you
tell me how to love my daughter more?” she asked. “I want to love her so
much, and I try my best, but when I look at her I see what happened to me
and it interferes.” A tear rolled down her cheek, but her tone turned
almost fierce, challenging. “Can you tell me how to love my daughter more?”
she repeated.

Perhaps Todd Akin has an answer for her.

*Illustration by Jordan Awan.*


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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