In the coming weeks and months, prepare to hear a common red herring trotted out by abortion-rights advocates: the “rape and incest” trope. Pro-lifers must be extremely clear, of course, that rape and incest are horrific and wrong, and that rape, in particular, is one of the single worst things that one human being can do to another. “The tragedy of sexual violence,” as Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) put it eloquently in a 2018 speech, “is an act from the pit of hell. People — men and women — are created in the image of God — imago Dei, as we say in Christianity. Sexuality is a deep and precious gift — it is an intimacy, it is a oneness — that is to be shared and given — never taken. Sex is big, not small — and you don’t get to decide it for someone else.”
But that’s not really what we’re debating when we talk about the vast, vast majority of abortion in America. Abortions as a result of rape and incest are real, but infinitesimally rare. According to a widely cited 2004 study from the pro-abortion-rights Guttmacher Institute, just 1 percent of abortions are the result of rape, and less than half a percent are the result of incest. A later survey of “data from seven state health/statistics agencies that report relevant statistics” suggested that the Guttmacher Institute’s calculations were actually “inflated by roughly a factor of three,” and that the actual numbers were 0.3 percent in cases of rape, and 0.03 percent in cases of incest.
Even the largest estimates suggest that if a nationwide ban included the exemptions for rape and incest that pro-choice activists regularly zero in on, more than 98 percent of abortions would still be illegal. Although those exemptions are morally incoherent from the standpoint of a consistent pro-life position — if an unborn child has an unalienable right to life, his or her humanity is not negated by the tragic circumstances of conception — I’m sure most pro-life advocates would see an abolition of 98+ percent of abortions as a relatively satisfactory outcome, at least in the short term.