<font size="4"><b><i>The Newyorker</i></b></font><br><br><div class="published" title="2012-08-29T13:38:14">August 29, 2012</div>
<h1 class="entry-title">The Legitimate Children of Rape</h1>
<div class="byline">Posted by <cite class="vcard author"><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/andrew_solomon/search?contributorName=Andrew%20Solomon" title="search site for content by Andrew Solomon" rel="author">Andrew Solomon</a></cite></div>
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<p><img alt="solomon-rape-233.jpg" src="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/solomon-rape-233.jpg" class="mt-image-right" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 20px 20px;" height="233" width="233"></p>
<p>Writing in the <em>American Journal of Preventive Medicine</em>, 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.” </p>
<div id="entry-more"><p>I have been researching a book, “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Far-From-Tree-Children-Identity/dp/0743236718/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0" target="_blank">Far from the Tree</a>,”
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.” </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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: </p>
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.” </p>
<p>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.” </p>
<p>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.” </p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.” </p>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/apr/16/balkans" target="_blank">wrote</a>
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.” </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Perhaps Todd Akin has an answer for her. </p>
<p><em>Illustration by Jordan Awan.</em></p></div>
</div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br><br><img src="http://users.moscow.com/waf/WP%20Fox%2001.jpg"><br>
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