Hello all. I'm posting this to clarify Ron Paul's position on the so called "rape exception" on abortion, and why his answer is the only sane pro life answer.
The rape exception is a "whip saw" that liberals use to slash pro-lifers coming and going. Here's how it works. If you say you don't support a rape exception then you don't care about rape victims. If you do support a rape exception, then that undermines your pro-life claim. After all, the fetus didn't commit the rape. Why should the fetus be murdered, if you believe abortion is murder, just because of a crime his/her father committed? We don't do that for any other crime.
I have seen pro abortionists go after pro lifers who give into the rape exception political correctness in just the manner I mentioned. And...they're right. A rape exception for abortion is hypocritical. Here is the website of Rebecca Kiessling, a pro-life activist who was conceived by rape.
http://www.rebeccakiessling.com/
Do you have the guts to tell her that she should have been adopted?
Check out this video of Gianna Davis, an abortion survivor of a late term saline abortion. Quote of the video is 7:30. "If abortion is about women's rights, then what about mine?"
If her father had raped her mother, would her late term abortion have been okay?
Which brings me to Ron Paul's position. He does not support a "rape exception" that could have been applied to Rebecca Kiessling even in a late term abortion like what happened with Gianna Davis. His position is based on the stage of pregnancy, not the manner of conception. He supports the morning after pill. He brought that up in the context of rape, but his position isn't about rape. Here are his words.
Paul responded, “No. If it’s an honest rape, that individual should go immediately to the emergency room. I would give them a shot of estrogen or give them...”
Morgan interjected, “You would allow them to abort the baby?”
Paul replied, “It is absolutely in limbo, because an hour after intercourse or a day afterwards, there is no legal or medical problem. If you talk about somebody coming in and they say, well, I was raped and I’m seven months pregnant and I don’t want to have anything to do with it, it’s a little bit different story.”
Apply that to the two women in question. Had Rebecca Kiessling's mom come to Dr. Paul immediately after the rape, he would have given her a shot of estrogen as emergency contraception. But note, he doesn't say he wouldn't have given Gianna Davis' mom the same shot. Consider this though. Say if Rebecca Kiessling's mom had been raped and held prisoner by her rapist for 7 months or even 3 months? At that point a shot of estrogen would not have done any good! A true "rape exception" for abortion considers the possibility that even in an "honest rape" a mother might not be able to get to the hospital within the time window for emergency contraception to be effective.
So why does Ron Paul support emergency contraception? Because the overwhelming evidence is that it is not abortion. Yes there is a risk that it could be abortive as conception might have already happened. But even those against emergency contraception admit that is a rarity. There are all kinds of medications that women take for other purposes that might cause them to lose an embryo they might not even know is growing inside of them.
Regardless of whether you agree with abortion or not, Ron Paul's position is at least logical in that it doesn't make a distinction on the value of an unborn life based on the immoral politically correct calculus that somehow the life of a child conceived in rape is worth less than the life of a child conceived in wanton pleasure.
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