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Pamela
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 Sat Mar 24, 2007 18:29 pm If you were raped and got pregnant, how would you feel? |
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Hi Torsten,
Coming from a culture where my Mom used to tell me that I will get pregnant even by a mere touch of a man, you could imagine the fear I had all the years before I have learnt the reproductive system. Though I know better now, it still gives me chills just to think of it.
From this fear that I imagine, there is a chance that I might consider killing myself but I hope there would be somebody who'd stop me.
I'm sure there are ways to avoid pregnancy by taking pills but if I were forced to carry the child I think I would suffer the 9 months mostly on fear of not being able to love the child or things like what do I tell the child if she ask about her father or the trauma of the rape itself.
Like Pamela, I think I would love the child because she is mine and she can't help being fathered by a rapist!
I am also certain that I won't even consider abortion because I once saw a video on abortion when I was 15. "The Silence Scream" is the title if I were not mistaken. But I can still see the image vividly on my mind. The doctor put sort of a scissor into the woman's womb(I think I almost fainted when I saw this!) and I remembered I can't stop crying after I saw the embryo(the baby was at this stage I think) screamed with the mouth opened wide when the doctor cut it into two(of course there was no screaming heard, hence the title) before the doctor crushed its head the rest.
And in a woman's magazine too, I read that women suffered psychologically after doing abortion not to mention the pain they endured after the process.
What about you?Imagine a thing like this befalls any of your female family member, how would you react?
Nina
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NinaZara
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| Sun Mar 25, 2007 12:30 pm If you were raped and got pregnant, how would you feel? |
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| NinaZara wrote: | | What about you?Imagine a thing like this befalls any of your female family member, how would you react?Nina |
Hi Nina,
Many thanks for sharing your thoughts with us. It's a pretty tough question, isn't it? As for me, I would try and give my loved one all the support and love they need in order to cope with this trauma. You are right, the child needs all the love she can get, she has the same right to live and develop as anyone else. The mother might find a man who loves her and her child and he might be a better father than many biological ones. I think at some point I would also try and bring the rapist to justice. Any adversity most bear the seedling of an equivalent benefit, that's a law of nature. When you suffer a hardship you must be compensated for your courage and strength to cope with the situation.
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Torsten
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| Sat Oct 27, 2007 13:51 pm If you were raped and got pregnant, how would you feel? |
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Have you ever talked to or heard an interview with someone who was conceived in rape? They have a unique perspective. Once I saw a lawyer on TV who was the product of a rape but whose mother carried her to full term and gave her up for adoption. She said that she frequently has discussions in which people tell her that women should definitely get abortions if they're raped. She said this amounts to people telling her she should be dead. When she tells them she was conceived in rape and is happy she isn't dead, the people don't know what to say.
And, at least in the United States, people don't learn enough about the bad psychological effects abortion has on the woman. I think that for most women it has to be at least as hard to get over the abortion trauma as it is to get over having a rapist's child. |
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Jamie (K)
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Joined: 24 Feb 2006
Posts: 4216
Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| Sat Dec 29, 2007 22:16 pm If you were raped and got pregnant, how would you feel? |
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| Is it fair to expect someone to take on a commitment as huge as becoming a parent against their will? True, it's not the potential child's fault, but nor is it the potential mother's. If I found myself in such an awful position, my first reaction would probably be to get the 'morning-after pill' to prevent pregnancy. I have no problem with abortion when it's a ball of cells being destroyed, but later and later in the term I become morally uneasy. |
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screenager
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Joined: 20 Nov 2007
Posts: 11
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| Sat Dec 29, 2007 22:35 pm If you were raped and got pregnant, how would you feel? |
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| screenager wrote: | | Is it fair to expect someone to take on a commitment as huge as becoming a parent against their will? |
Many things in life are not fair. People have responsibility for the results of their deeds whether they want them or not.
A woman I know was told by her husband -- after their two children could already walk and talk -- that he didn't want to be a father. Is it fair to expect him to continue the commitment of being a parent against his will? You bet it is! What he wants is not fair.
How about cases in which a woman decides she wants to have a baby by her husband or boyfriend, does not use birth control, and then changes her mind after she's pregnant? Is it fair to expect the father to agree to his unborn child being killed against his will?
What about people like typical Americans born in the baby boom generation and later who have an unnatural babyphobia? Should they kill their kids for the sake of convenience, or because they want to fit into their bathing suits in a couple of months, or because the kids will prevent them from affording certain luxuries they want? |
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Jamie (K)
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Joined: 24 Feb 2006
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Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| Sat Dec 29, 2007 23:21 pm If you were raped and got pregnant, how would you feel? |
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| In the examples you cited, both parents made the conscious decision to have children in the first place. They're going back on a huge earlier commitment, which is - as you say - completely unfair. A pregnant rape victim should not have to take responsibility for result of their rapist's crime. She would be equally within her rights to keep the child. |
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screenager
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| Mon Jan 14, 2008 4:36 am If you were raped and got pregnant, how would you feel? |
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what's the required procedure if people want go for an abortion in your country?
In China, we can see the Ads about abortion everywhere and just about 300 cny for that OPS. in come local cliniques.
Edwin
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edwin
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| Mon Jan 14, 2008 5:09 am If you were raped and got pregnant, how would you feel? |
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| edwin wrote: | | what's the required procedure if people want go for an abortion in your country? |
In the US, everything depends on which state one lives in. States can't completely outlaw abortion right now, but they can set some restrictions and require certain steps before it happens.
Many states require that the woman take 48 hours to think about the decision. Some states require that the woman be shown photos of unborn children of the approximate age of the one they're carrying. (Some clinics show the women high-definition ultrasounds of their own baby in the womb, and I understand that more than 80% of the women who see those decide not to have abortions.) In some states, an underage girl's parents don't have to be notified about the abortion (and so if the girl has medical or psychological problems as a result of it, the parents don't know what's going on). In other states, a girl's parents MUST be told.
Abortion clinics are supposed to report pregnancies of underage girls when the father is an adult, because that is statutory rape, which is a serious crime. However, there have been scandals lately when it was found that the clinics encouraged many girls to lie about their boyfriend's age.
Abortion is getting less and less popular in the US, and the number of hospitals and clinics performing them is only about half as big as it was 25 years ago. |
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Jamie (K)
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Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| Mon Jan 14, 2008 13:07 pm If you were raped and got pregnant, how would you feel? |
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| Jamie (K) wrote: | | Abortion is getting less and less popular in the US, and the number of hospitals and clinics performing them is only about half as big as it was 25 years ago. |
How much do you think that has to do with the current administration's opposition of abortion, e.g. cutting funding to family planning organisations that mention abortion as an option, 'abstinence only' sex education? |
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screenager
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Joined: 20 Nov 2007
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| Mon Jan 14, 2008 14:36 pm If you were raped and got pregnant, how would you feel? |
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| screenager wrote: | | Jamie (K) wrote: | | Abortion is getting less and less popular in the US, and the number of hospitals and clinics performing them is only about half as big as it was 25 years ago. |
How much do you think that has to do with the current administration's opposition of abortion, e.g. cutting funding to family planning organisations that mention abortion as an option, 'abstinence only' sex education? |
It's got less to do with any policy by the presidential administration than it does with a change in people's mentality. Besides, the president can't make laws and he doesn't make the budget. The Congress does that, he can only approve or reject them, and he always has to compromise somehow. So if funding to some group or other is cut, the Congress has to do it. Very often the Congress makes budget decisions like that and blame the president in public. For example, you'll frequently hear them blame budget deficits on presidents, when they are actually the ones who draw up the budget.
The reduction in abortion comes mainly from a change in people's mentality and their choices not to have abortions. When I was a teenager, we were all brainwashed into thinking that abortion was a "simple medical procedure", the the baby was a "lump of tissue", and that there were no adverse consequences to it. So you used to hear girls say that if they got pregnant they'd "just get an abortion".
In the decades since that time, so many women have had abortions that it's now common knowledge that abortion often has negative medical, psychological and emotional consequences, and sometimes really horrible ones. So nowadays if some girl in one of my classes tells me she's pregnant, it's not unusual for her to day, "I would never consider abortion," because she has met women who have had abortions and they have told her about it. You never hear the expression "just get an abortion" anymore, because now even teenagers know the whole thing is a grave decision that sometimes has lifelong consequences. The rise of ultrasound imaging -- especially high-definition ultrasound -- has also cut the abortion rate. Women at the stage of pregnancy in which the baby was previously said to be "just a clump of tissue" can now look inside their wombs and clearly see a human being in there, doing many of the things that newborn babies do.
As for the various types of sex education, the problem is not about whether or not the style of sex education "mentions abortion as an alternative", although this line is the red herring that the media puts out there. What's at issue is the general approach toward sex that's brought into the education. Since the late 1960s, the attitude of sex educators has been that "kids are going to have sex anyway, so we'll teach them to do it safely." This style of sex education doesn't even mention abstinence as an alternative! It has had 40 years to show its effectiveness, and the results are skyrocketing rates of teenage pregnancies and outrageous rates of sexually transmitted disease (often incurable ones) that couldn't have been imagined before about 1967, when most teenagers were still abstaining.
People who oppose it like to point to "abstinence-only" sex education as a failure by trotting out a kid here and there who didn't abstain, but abstinence education has actually brought teenage pregnancy rates down where it has been used, while the old style of sex education has had the opposite effect. |
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Jamie (K)
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Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| Mon Jan 14, 2008 14:57 pm If you were raped and got pregnant, how would you feel? |
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None of the studies I've seen have found a correlation between abstinence-only sex education and declining transmission of STDs, could you cite your sources please? Obviously I can only speak for myself: I learned about all kinds of contraception, but I never had a sex ed talk that didn't conclude with, "...but the only sure-fire way to stop yourself from getting pregnant or contracting an STD is to abstain." Sure, it was common knowledge that so-and-so slept around, and in my seven years of school I heard of one or two girls who left because they were pregnant, but the vast, vast majority didn't.
The countries with the lowest rate of teen pregnancy are places like Japan and the Netherlands, where children receive comprehensive sex education from the time they're 9 or 10. Ignoring the reality that teenagers DO have sex and saying, "Just tell them not to do it," is irresponsible; it's just going to be ignored by those who need the information most.
Teen pregnancy has increased because it's ceased to be a total cultural taboo. I live in Ireland. 50 years ago, a pregnant teenager would have been a pariah, quite likely abandoned by her family. Now, she will get a house, a car, and enough money to support herself and her child.
For a lot of girls, getting pregnant is actually a means to an end: a comfortable life on the dole queue. That's a problem in the UK, which hopefully will be eradicated by the next government. Sex education has nothing to do with it. |
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screenager
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Joined: 20 Nov 2007
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| Mon Jan 14, 2008 15:44 pm If you were raped and got pregnant, how would you feel? |
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| screenager wrote: | | None of the studies I've seen have found a correlation between abstinence-only sex education and declining transmission of STDs, could you cite your sources please? |
This will take some digging. I'm going to look. I know from my own field that studies done of short-term consequences of various programs are frequently deceptive, because the real effects don't kick in until after the study period. So giving an abstinence-only program, or any kind of program, and then studying the kids' behavior three months later isn't as informative as checking back five and ten years later, after things begin to "seep in". I've seen some studies that check changes in the kids' attitudes the same day the program ends, which also yields a bogus result.
| screenager wrote: | | Obviously I can only speak for myself: I learned about all kinds of contraception, but I never had a sex ed talk that didn't conclude with, "...but the only sure-fire way to stop yourself from getting pregnant or contracting an STD is to abstain." |
Yes, but you're in Ireland. The American programs often encourage kids to have sex.
| screenager wrote: | | Sure, it was common knowledge that so-and-so slept around, and in my seven years of school I heard of one or two girls who left because they were pregnant, but the vast, vast majority didn't. |
Yes, but you're in Ireland.
| screenager wrote: | | The countries with the lowest rate of teen pregnancy are places like Japan and the Netherlands, where children receive comprehensive sex education from the time they're 9 or 10. |
What kind of sex education do they have? It's like when they said the literacy rate in Nicaragua is 99%, shaming the US, which has an (exaggerated) illiteracy rate of more than 35%. It turns out that in the Nicaragua study, people who could write their names were called "literate", while in the American studies, people who could read and write but couldn't perform certain complex literacy tasks were called "illiterate".
So Japan and the Netherlands have low rates of teen pregnancy and they have "comprehensive sex education" beginning at age 9 or 10. What kind of sex education do the Japanese children get? What are they taught? You don't know. Does the sex education cause the rate of teen pregnancy to be low? You don't know. Probably nobody can know, so you're jumping to a conclusion. Why in other countries, such as the United States, is comprehensive sex education accompanied by a rise in teenage pregnancies? There are answers, but you don't know them.
| screenager wrote: | | Ignoring the reality that teenagers DO have sex and saying, "Just tell them not to do it," is irresponsible; it's just going to be ignored by those who need the information most. |
Yes, that's what people said in the '60s. By the same token, ignoring the fact that early sex and pregnancy can have devastating consequences to the rest of a teenager's life, and encouraging them to have sex is also irresponsible, but that's what many sex education programs do. They also exaggerate the effectiveness of condoms in preventing disease, do not give realistic failure rate statistics for various forms of birth control, and they don't discuss the medical and psychological effects that abortion can have. You've got women in their 20s walking around thinking that birth control pills guarantee that a woman won't get pregnant, because their comprehensive sex education didn't tell them the true failure rate. You've got people walking around with genital warts or other incurable diseases because their sex educators told them that condoms prevent sexually transmitted diseases. Who is being most irresponsible here?
Besides, abstinence programs don't "just tell them not to do it", as your caricature depicts them. They're much more involved than that. You're acting as if the people who put them on are some kind of troglodytes. What do you imagine the do? Stand there and repeat over and over for hours and days that kids shouldn't have sex and don't instruct them in anything else?
| screenager wrote: | | Teen pregnancy has increased because it's ceased to be a total cultural taboo. |
Partly, yes. But why has it ceased to be a cultural taboo? Because of the type of sex education people get, both in school and through the media, both formal and implicit.
| screenager wrote: | I live in Ireland. 50 years ago, a pregnant teenager would have been a pariah, quite likely abandoned by her family. Now, she will get a house, a car, and enough money to support herself and her child.
For a lot of girls, getting pregnant is actually a means to an end: a comfortable life on the dole queue. That's a problem in the UK, which hopefully will be eradicated by the next government. Sex education has nothing to do with it. |
Yes, that's a problem of misguided socialism. It happened in the US too. But changes in sex education have plenty to do with it, because they no longer teach self-restraint, as they did 60 or 70 years ago. They don't teach the logic behind abstaining, so kids think there is no logic. When kids got a general message of virtue and self-restraint from school and from the general culture, most of them restrained themselves. There was welfare in the US for decades before the birthrate skyrocketed, so socialism can't be the entire cause. |
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Jamie (K)
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Joined: 24 Feb 2006
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Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| Mon Jan 14, 2008 17:01 pm If you were raped and got pregnant, how would you feel? |
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| Jamie (K) wrote: | Yes, but you're in Ireland. The American programs often encourage kids to have sex.
Yes, but you're in Ireland. |
How does the fact that I'm in Ireland leave me less qualified to talk about teen pregnancy? We also have sex education, and we also have teen pregnancy. The same principles apply.
In what way do American sex ed programs "encourage" teenagers to have sex?
| Quote: | What kind of sex education do they have? It's like when they said the literacy rate in Nicaragua is 99%, shaming the US, which has an (exaggerated) illiteracy rate of more than 35%. It turns out that in the Nicaragua study, people who could write their names were called "literate", while in the American studies, people who could read and write but couldn't perform certain complex literacy tasks were called "illiterate".
So Japan and the Netherlands have low rates of teen pregnancy and they have "comprehensive sex education" beginning at age 9 or 10. What kind of sex education do the Japanese children get? What are they taught? You don't know. Does the sex education cause the rate of teen pregnancy to be low? You don't know. Probably nobody can know, so you're jumping to a conclusion. Why in other countries, such as the United States, is comprehensive sex education accompanied by a rise in teenage pregnancies? There are answers, but you don't know them. |
I'll go set up a thread on another forum I use, which is has a lot of regulars from continental Europe, and I'll get back to you with exactly the kind of sex ed kids in Holland get.
[quote]Yes, that's what people said in the '60s. By the same token, ignoring the fact that early sex and pregnancy can have devastating consequences to the rest of a teenager's life, and encouraging them to have sex is also irresponsible, but that's what many sex education programs do. They also exaggerate the effectiveness of condoms in preventing disease, do not give realistic failure rate statistics for various forms of birth control, and they don't discuss the medical and psychological effects that abortion can have. You've got women in their 20s walking around thinking that birth control pills guarantee that a woman won't get pregnant, because their comprehensive sex education didn't tell them the true failure rate. You've got people walking around with genital warts or other incurable diseases because their sex educators told them that condoms prevent sexually transmitted diseases. Who is being most irresponsible here?[quote] Of course the people responsible for those programs are at fault! They're manipulating the facts to suit a pro-birth control agenda, just as the "abstinence only" organisers manipulate the facts to suit an anti-birth control agenda. I don't defend either of them.
What I defend is sex education that gives teenagers the facts. Tells them what different types of birth control protect them from and what they are exposed to even when they wear a condom - genital warts, crabs etc.
| Quote: | | Besides, abstinence programs don't "just tell them not to do it", as your caricature depicts them. They're much more involved than that. You're acting as if the people who put them on are some kind of troglodytes. What do you imagine the do? Stand there and repeat over and over for hours and days that kids shouldn't have sex and don't instruct them in anything else? |
Of course not. It's just as pernicious as the misleading sex ed they you talked about. My source is a friend in Las Vegas, not speculation from the title "abstinence only". She was told about different sexually transmitted diseases and about the negative effects of abortion, but she was also told that no form of contraception is effective - not, "no form is TOTALLY effective," which is true, but simply that none of them were reliable.
By contrast, I learned about the Pill. I learned that it can have side-effects like heart and circulation problems. I learned about diaphragms. I learned that, like the Pill, they will stop you from getting pregnant but won't protect you from STDs. I learned that condoms prevent pregnancy when they are used correctly. I also learned that they can break. I also learned that the 'morning-after' pill is available as a last-resort contraceptive.
I learned about a whole load of STDs and how diseases like chlamydia can leave you infertile. The point that was hammered home was, "You don't know the other person's sexual history, and all of their partners' sexual histories. The only way to be SURE you won't catch anything is to wait until you are married or in a secure relationship, with someone who has also waited."
Maybe I'm brainwashed, but I think that's responsible! I am definitely not in favour of the propaganda you're talking about, or the propaganda my Nevada friend was fed.
| Quote: | Partly, yes. But why has it ceased to be a cultural taboo? Because of the type of sex education people get, both in school and through the media, both formal and implicit.
Yes, that's a problem of misguided socialism. It happened in the US too. But changes in sex education have plenty to do with it, because they no longer teach self-restraint, as they did 60 or 70 years ago. They don't teach the logic behind abstaining, so kids think there is no logic. When kids got a general message of virtue and self-restraint from school and from the general culture, most of them restrained themselves. There was welfare in the US for decades before the birthrate skyrocketed, so socialism can't be the entire cause. |
I think you overestimate the importance of sex education in increasing underage pregnancies. Here at least, it's certainly less of a factor, but we still have teen pregnancies. The media does encourage a more casual attitude to sex than exists in the real world.
At the end of the day, however, I think it's all down to the person. The same people will have sex, with or without sex education. I'm not anti-sex at all: if a couple are over the age of consent, it's nobody's business but theirs if they're sleeping together. The role of sex education is to give them the straight facts on how to do it safely.
The biggest problem with sex ed in this country (IMO) is the total lack of instruction for homosexuals. That's something that needs to be seriously looked at.
It's been poorly implemented in your country. That doesn't mean the principle itself is unsound. |
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screenager
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