The GOP congressional candidate John Koster and I have something in common; we have both met women. Not only that, but we have both met women who have been raped. In fact, truly a coincidence if you believe that women who are raped almost never get pregnant, we both know an individual who a) is a woman, b) has been raped and c) became pregnant as a result of that rape. The coincidences end there.
I know a woman who was raped and kept the child, gave it up for adoption and doesn’t regret it.
I know a woman who was raped and had an abortion and doesn't regret it.
Very late one night I got a call from a friend. She has a soft high-pitched voice and sounds like a little girl when she's very upset. The hour and the tone of her voice told me that something was seriously wrong. I had a hunch about the cause.
She and I had gone to college together. Since then, I moved to New York and she moved to another large city where she was working on a doctoral thesis in physics. Earlier in the week, she phoned and told me that a man with whom we had both gone to college had moved from my city to hers. He had gotten her phone number from a mutual friend and ended the conversation with something to the effect of "we should get together soon." I told her, as firmly as I could manage, that she should not meet with him. "Just trust me," I said.
She did not, I'm sorry to say, trust me. The reason I had not told her the truth, that the man in question had assaulted me a few months earlier, involved complicated interpersonal relations among half a dozen people with whom I had gone to school and explaining it would be long and involved without adding much to the story. I had reason to believe she would dismiss my story, so I didn't tell her why she shouldn't meet him, just that she shouldn't. Perhaps, if I had known that things would turn out even worse for her, I might have tried. Still, I doubt she would have believed me.
So late at night, I got a phone call. She was bleeding and the bleeding wouldn't stop. She was too embarrassed to go to the emergency room and wanted me to stay on the phone until she stopped bleeding. I tried to talk her into going to the emergency room anyway. She refused. It was frustrating to get a phone call like this as such a distance. She was crying and slightly incoherent, like someone who was dazed. A stranger talking to her on the phone would have thought she was a slow ten year old, not a doctoral candidate in her mid-twenties.
About three or four weeks later, I got another phone call. She was pregnant. One of the other students in the program went with her to have an abortion. I don't know the details, which implies that it was uneventful. We've spoken of the incident on many occasions and the only thing she regrets is not trusting me. The abortion, she doesn't regret.
So, Mr. Koster has his anecdata and I have mine. Neither anecdote is data. What percentage of women would like to at least have the choice of having an abortion if she was raped? I don't have the data, but I suspect it's high. I couldn't find a poll that asked women exactly that question, but according to a CNN/ORC poll taken in August of this year, only 14% of all the public believes that abortion should be illegal in cases of rape.
