“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes. The entire draft opinion can be read below:
(www.scribd.com)
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I think given the subject matter on this board, you realize that not every woman chooses to have sex when they get pregnant. And not every woman who chooses to have sex chooses to get pregnant.
A man who sabotages the condom can make that choice for her, for instance.
It’s also worth noting that if a woman can’t get an abortion, that allows rapists an enormous amount of power over their victims, if they’re willing to go to jail for it.
“Sure, I’m going to jail. But nobody was having sex with me. Now, my genes are going to be passed on by Natalie Portman. I’m okay with it.”
Sure, we could allow abortions in the case of rape, but why? If we’re prioritizing the life above all else, the fetus didn’t commit the rape. So I can’t think of a logical reason to allow rape victims to get abortions under a purely pro-life approach.
I’m not going to sit here and defend abortion, because I don’t believe in abortion. But let’s not oversimplify the pro-choice position here. It’s about far more than sluts being slutty.
As someone who has interacted with rape survivors in a professional setting, I can tell you firsthand that the vast majority of women who get an abortion in order to erase a rape from their lives are not usually going to take time to talk about that situation with someone taking statistics over it.
Data over sexual assault is incredibly hard to mine, because it requires people who want to talk about it (after taking measures to forget it completely), and so a lot of data involving this population is severely underreported.
There's not a good way to take reliable data over why a woman is getting an abortion in the US, so I'd be careful with statistics suggesting rape as such a low percentage.
I don't know what statistics you'd trust, but look up on your own how many women experience rape or rape attempts. The sources I'm seeing say between 1 in 5 or 1 in 6 women report this.
Now ask yourself if you honestly believe that with so many of those, the number that result in pregnancy is inconsequentially small. Your answer may agree with mine.
I didn't say that at all. I simply said that "a fraction of a fraction" is too low, and I explained why. I also explained that this population is resistant to accurate data being taken.
"Hey, can you tell me if you're leaving this abortion clinic because you're trying to forget the most painful and destructive memory you have? I just want to know if you're trying to forget your rape or not."
Not really an easy way to get a high participation from the population on that one. No matter how you finesse it, it's tough enough to ask a woman to justify her reason for an abortion, and even tougher to get rape survivors to talk to you about the experience. The statistics on "people who admit they got an abortion to hide/recover from a rape" is never going to show as high a number as it probably should.
Just as well, we aren't ever going to get good statistics on women who are forced to get abortions by their abusive boyfriends or husbands. It's just a dataset that is going to be very hard to access, because the population, by definition, is hard to access.