Except for rape and….incest?

There has been a bit of brou-ha-ha recently that the Republican party platform has a statement that is anti-abortion even in cases of rape and incest. This is supposed to be illustrative of Republican extremism. The thinking goes that it’s one thing to be anti-abortion. It’s another to be anti-abortion in cases of rape and incest. Rape and incest are almost always grouped together. I find this pairing strange.

Let’s say someone is anti-abortion from the moment of conception. I could see this person holding one of two views on abortion in the case of rape.

One is that just because the circumstances of a baby’s conception are horrific, and it might make the mother completely miserable, that’s not a good enough reason to kill it. You couldn’t permissibly kill a full-term infant just born who was the result of a rape, even if his mother was made miserable on seeing him. The fetus is just as much a person (morally speaking) as that infant, so you can’t permissibly kill it either. Even if it makes the mother thoroughly miserable. This, I suppose, is the Republican thinking, and even if it is not my thinking, it makes sense.

Another person who is anti-abortion from conception could still reasonably argue for an exception in the case of rape. The fetus has a right to life, she could say, but it doesn’t have the right to use someone else’s body to sustain that life. Since the mother did not consent to the conditions that started the fetus’s life, the does not have to use her body to sustain that life. And I guess that’s the position the left thinks right should have lest they be considered extremist. That makes some sense to me, and I can see the objection.

But where on earth does this this incest objection come from? Why is it considered extremist to say, if one is generally anti-abortion, one should not have an abortion if the child is conceived incestuously? Why is it always coupled with rape?

Allow me to say unequivocally at this point: I am not pro-incest. I do not practice it, I find it repulsive, yuck, gag, bleah. Consider me unquestionably anti-incest in practice and in theory.

If you’re talking about a father molesting his 13-year-old daughter, is the problem incest or rape? The problem with that situation is not that they are related, but that the father raped the girl.

If you’re saying that it is an extreme position to be anti-abortion in the case of incest just because the child is more likely to be disabled than in a typical pregnancy, well, that’s a little weird, too. If one believes the fetus is a person, then it only makes sense that one wouldn’t want to abort a disabled person. That’s not extremist (again, given you already have anti-abortion views). One doesn’t kill a disabled baby, after all. And an inbred fetus is only a possibly disabled person, not a definitely disabled person. I understand that many people would want to abort such a fetus. But I don’t think believing that it is impermissible to abort a disabled fetus, or a possibly disabled fetus, represents an extreme view.

Forbidding it to save the life of the mother? That’s an extreme and indefensible view.

So, in short, I don’t understand how incest gets thrown in there with rape. Personally, I tend to think abortion is immoral in many (not all) cases, but I am in favor of keeping abortion legal out of respect for the complexity of the issue and other people’s good faith reasoning. I can see both how the Republicans would want not to have an exception in cases of rape, and I can see how Democrats would think that position is extreme. But how did incest get mixed up in the middle of this?

 

 

Rose Woodhouse

Elizabeth Picciuto was born and reared on Long Island, and, as was the custom for the time and place, got a PhD in philosophy. She freelances, mainly about disability, but once in a while about yeti. Mother to three children, one of whom is disabled, two of whom have brown eyes, three of whom are reasonable cute, you do not want to get her started talking about gardening.

35 Comments

  1. I want to say that this dates back to the earliest debates regarding abortion. Back when the argument was to loosen restrictions rather than tighten them, the camel’s nose was “well, what about rape or incest or when the mother’s life is in danger?”

    People softened after that question. Understandably.

    Now it’s part of the furniture. When pro-life/anti-abortion/anti-choice/whatever you want to call them now make their arguments about limiting abortion, mentioning rape/incest/mother’s life in danger is part of the boilerplate exception that they want you to know that they aren’t talking about.

    Where it came from originally? I want to say that it was included as a rhetorical device to give a triad of exceptions. Triads flow in a way that duads don’t.

    • I realize that the “earliest debates” go back thousands of years when I only intended to go back to the 50’s and 60’s and 70’s.

      I regret the error.

  2. Rose-

    I’ve wondered about this myself. My wondering was limited as abortion is generally not a particularly hot-button issue for me. The best I could reckon was that “incest” was used to invoke a scenario like the one you described, where an older family impregnates a too-young-to-consent one, at which point we were simply being redundant, since this itself is rape. While I am a pro-choice in general, if we were carving out specific exemptions, incest is one that always seemed a bit curious to me.

  3. Perhaps it comes from considering whether the world would have been better off without the Spanish Habsburgs.

    • Nobody likes to be the heavy. The problem is that when you’re in charge of maintaining an institution as important as the HRE, you’re not going to do that without offending the sensibilities of a few people who will be grasping about for reasons to gossip ugly things about you anyway.

      If it wasn’t them, it’s be someone who proved insufficient to deal with the Habsburgs and so goodness knows what else they’d prove to be insufficient to deal with.

      • The Spanish Habsburgs didn’t rule the HRE; that was the Austrian Habsburgs . And the most singular feature of the HRE is that, while it lasted for almost a thousand years, with each one that passed it became less important.

        What I meant about the Spanish ones is this: they married almost entirely each other. When you see royalty portrayed as so inbred that they have the faculties of an Irish Setter, they’re the model. The last Habsburg king of Spain, Charles II (according to Wikipedia) “was born physically and mentally disabled, and disfigured. Possibly through affliction with mandibular prognathism, he was unable to chew. His tongue was so large that his speech could barely be understood, and he frequently drooled.” His mother, Mariana of Austria, was his father’s niece on her mothers side, and his cousin on her father’s side.

  4. More seriously, I think it’s related to “legitimate rape”. Rose made the argument for not forcing a woman who’s been forcibly raped to complete the pregnancy (and, in my opinion, it’s a good one.). Suppose the rape was statutory only, say a 14-year-old girl with her 18-year-old boyfriend. There’s still an argument, but it’s a different one. Now suppose the 18-year-old is her brother. Yet a different argument.

    • The comment I made then deleted before posting was making a distinction between rape, rape rape, and rape rape rape.

      Incest, of course, being that last one.

      It struck me as coming across as much more insensitive than explanatory but, maybe with this disclaimer, it won’t be. Or, maybe, only come across as being as insensitive as explanatory.

    • Mike-

      If the girl wants to keep the child, why is there even a discussion?

      If she wants to abort, but only because she didn’t intend to get pregnant, but DID intend to have sex, how does that change the moral calculus?

  5. After the Todd Akin fiasco, I’ve decided that the “and incest” proviso is a symptom of certain people being unwilling to regard statutory rape as “legitimate rape.” Incest is meant as a stand-in for statutory rape–it allows for a kind of statutory rape they regard as legitimate without opening the door to 15-year-old girls pregnant from consensual sex with their 19-year-old boyfriends, and so on. I don’t think the anti-choice-but-for-rape-and-incest crowd stopped to consider how consensual adult incest would factor into the equation.

  6. Two things:

    1. I suspect it is a political strategy that has less to do actual incest, and more to do with how we process the word “rape” in our country. To a certain (and far too large) segment of our society the latter word suggests something that is or should be preventable by the victim. Where they were, who they were with, what they were doing/wearing/etc. It conjures for those people (Hello, Mr. Akin!) an unsubstantiated accusation more than it does an actual crime. Sadly, because of this I think the “excuse” of rape is often (and bizarrely) tuned out. But pretty much *everybody* gets incest; telling a 13 year old girl it was her fault is a place no one really dares go. Because of this, I think it gets tacked on as a way to underscore the “rape” in a way that hits home to more people.

    2. It’s so damn awesome to have you back!

    • “To a certain (and far too large) segment of our society the latter word suggests something that is or should be preventable by the victim”
      … yeah, see what Dwyer was saying about women being the “better candidates” for education with an eye towards preventing unwanted babies.

  7. To echo what some other people here have offered as possible answers, I think “incest” has the aura of lack of consent, even though certain specific cases (say, “kissing cousins”) might be consensual. I usually take “rape or incest” to mean “rape, for example, the default notion of ‘incest.'”

    Whether what I take the meaning to be is what the meaning actually is, I don’t know. But that’s how I see it.

  8. “Rape, incest, and life of the mother” each represents a different kind of violation of the social ethos of procreation – which is always more than mere childbearing, since it concerns the production of shared social meanings and the re-production of society as a whole. There is an implied, but merely whispered positive inducement to abortion in those instances, whispered because it is, of course, at war with competing value systems. The child produced by rape, incest, or at the cost of the life of the mother is implicitly – or, again, in whispers – presumed to be scarred, to be at a disadvantage, to be in constant denial of full participation, to live as a reminder of tragedy of some kind on the way to further tragedy. These are not necessary or scientific conclusions, but they do function according to a distinct logic. Like all elements of law, they express a social generalization and a prejudice, not an iron rule. Imagine being the child of rape, incest, or the sacrificed mother, being reminded that one’s own origins were so widely deemed problematic as to have justified your own pre-emptive erasure from existence. Your own existence is pronounced self-invalidating, your origin a cause of shame. As with so many similar matters, as matters for public or collective consideration, we have rather purposefully gone about invalidating all inherited systems for comprehending and coping with these questions. Public reason does not know what to make of such tragic complexities, which is typical of realms of morality that it wants to banish or pretend to banish to the private sphere, but which inevitably erupt right at the center of public life.

      • Kind of you to say so, Stillwater. I should say that I just happen to have been reading some real good stuff on different conceptions of love and the family in American/liberal culture, and specifically the problems that liberalism has making sense of them.

    • Interesting. With this interpretation in mind, I go back and forth whether lumping “life of the mother” in with “rape” and “incest” is fair. Still, there is a lot to chew on. I think the logic espoused here can also be traced back to earlier generations’ issues with out-of-wedlock children, the bastard child, the one whose origin story must not be spoken about. This continues in some society and even within some subgroups of American society but generally does not suffer the social prohibition the others do.

      • Agreed there is a similarity and overlap with the out-of-wedlock child, and we can always come up with gray areas, exceptions, and alternatives – including cultures with dramatically different customs – but we’re just wondering why the three might go together. The other similarity is that they all carry a notion of the impossibility, rather than mere lesser likelihood, of formation of a “natural” family or familial relationship: Under rape, the father is a criminal, and the child is the crime to the mother and her family, as well as the basis of a permanent relationship with the rapist and his kin; under incest, the coupling is “unnatural” and cannot be validated; under death of the mother, one parent is gone.

      • Oops, I probably should have been more careful about acknowledging any “similarity” between rape and non-marital sex: A congressdude from PA got in trouble for doing so just last week. Was speaking in abstract terms, of a formal parallel and overlapping cultural history, though acknowledging that in some cultures it is, and in our history has been taken much more seriously than it is today.

  9. When someone says “rape and incest” they usually are thinking of “rape by a stranger and rape by a family member.” Most children born to close relatives are healthy. Ironically, if consensual incest was not criminalized in most (not all) places, fewer pregnancies would end in abortion as pregnant women fear prosecution for consensual incest or have bought the common falsehood that such a child “will” have birth defects. Even a few women raped by a close relative would be more likely to go ahead and give birth if they knew a child would likely be healthy. I’ll add this disclaimer, which shouldn’t be necessary: rape by anyone is terrible and should land someone in prison for a very, very long time.

    • I’m finding estimates of about one-third for the rate of serious birth defects for parent-child or sibling-sibling pairings.

      • Interesting. Thanks for the research. Which means that Keith’s statement is technically correct, since 2/3 is technically “most.” Yet the word “most” conveys a meaning that obscures more than enlightens in this case.

        I don’t know about you, but if I was part of a young couple considering having a baby and was told that we had a 1/3 chance of serious birth defect due to some weird genetics, I would opt for sterilization and having a family by adoption. Plenty of kids out there need a home.

  10. I’ll just add to the growing consensus here that when I think of incest I think of father/daughter or some such where the female is generally under-age. Does adult incest even happen much?

    Another thought… so many of our modern families are split up, tacked together, and reconstituted melanges that quite often what would appear to be incest is really between genetically unrelated individuals. As a society, should we care about that? Let’s say Greg and Marsha Brady decided to get it on. Should that be illegal? Allowed but morally icky? Why?

    • The “ickiness” of Greg and Marsha is an excellent illustration of what the incest taboo is as much about as any medical contraindications. Again, viewing the question from the perspective of procreation as more than simple biological reproduction, the marriage of genetically non-related siblings fails to serve the social-ethical principles embodied in marriage (and family), which can be as difficult to explain as they are easy to intuit. Pure liberalism, based on metaphysical individualism and the primacy of narrow selfish interest has a very difficult time explaining why the incest taboo and other taboos or legal limitations on personal conduct, external restriction on the free individual’s free choice to seek whatever satisfaction, should be minded. So liberal theorists who do not want to admit that they are importing socially conservative presumptions generally revert to weak consequentialism or a strained discussion of unequal power relationships. The last especially could be and among certain theorists often are applied to conventionally approved of institutions and customs. The traditional marriage has also been described as an inherently unequal patriarchal power relation that re-produces the patriarchal state. Sex itself, especially heterosexual intercourse, has been coherently critiqued as inherently inequitable and oppressive.

    • Does adult incest even happen much?

      Only just followed the links here but there is an issue with siblings who are adopted to separate families and then meet as adults, try this for an example. I find it very hard to feel the kind of revulsion I do at child abuse on reading that story instead I feel sorry for both people who are facing a taboo never meant for cases like theirs.

  11. 1. When rape is mentioned, we presume sex that hasn’t been consented to. We also might presume violence. We’ve seen rape in movies and on television, for example. We have some idea.

    2. We don’t have any idea when it comes to incest, just as we don’t really have any idea when it comes to other forms of inter-family abuse. We can imagine a parent slapping a child perhaps, but to go much farther than that? It isn’t something that we as a society do. So for incest (which isn’t often violent, owing to child-parent power structures), it is a notion that we can’t (or won’t) imagine. However, I think the issue goes back to one of power structures and consent. Family holds incredible power, especially between generations.

    To put that another way, if a 36-year-old male rapes a 14-year-old, are we comfortable with abortion? What then is the difference if that 36-year-old is raping his 14-year-old daughter?

    • I’d also like to add that the incest we’re discussing here seems very innocuous to incest’s realities. I’d argue that this is just-world theory at work again, but I’m sure that’s boring by now.

      • Reality of incest varies quite dramatically from one situation to another.
        You have a girl getting pregnant by her younger brother (with little parental involvement/consent), to a girl’s entire bedroom reeking of pee because her brother would rape her repeatedly in her bed — and he was sized a bit big for a full bladder (the sort of thing parents condone/enforce)

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