Deborah Morse-Kahn: Another state’s giant step backward for women

03/07/2006

The nightmare grows for rape or incest victims in states like Mississippi and South Dakota.

Deborah Morse-Kahn
Star Tribune
Published: March 07, 2006

You are dragged into an alley by two men, beaten savagely and raped. Left alone in the dark and the rain, you huddle in a fetal position until all sounds of your attackers have faded into the night.

In sickness, shock and shame you crawl home and huddle in the back of a closet and shiver for hours, finally falling asleep, exhausted. The bruises are clear in the morning light. You cannot go to work and call in sick. You tell no one. And the days pass. Slowly you make your way out into the world and try to reconnect with reality. A day comes when you feel nauseated and throw up in the early morning. You are pregnant ... .

You are 13 and your father has been coming into your room at night for months, persuading you that he loves you and that if you loved him, too, you would let him touch you. Touching leads to intercourse. He threatens to throw you out of the house if you tell anyone. He tells you he will make you live on the streets. One day in the bathroom of your middle school you become sick and throw up in the toilet. You go to the school nurse, who wants to call your mother. You protest wildly and run out of the office. You know you are pregnant ... .

And you live in South Dakota. Or Mississippi. There, men in power have decided that you, victim, will have no recourse to a safe, hygienic abortion to rid you of the incubus that grows inside of you. Every day the fetus grows larger, the result of assault, treachery, lies and death threats.

But you live in South Dakota. Or Mississippi. And the governors of those states have endorsed bills against abortion. All abortion except to save the mother’s life. The governor of Mississippi has spent some time thinking about the rape and incest exception. He says he, personally, prefers the exceptions. But it’s an election year. If such a bill eliminating those humane options comes to his desk, “I suspect I’ll sign it.”

It is pointless to ask these men what they would privately arrange for their daughters or their sisters or their wives in the event of rape.

The issue is seen as a flag-waving moment. For God and decency we will outlaw abortion. For God’s sake, where is the human decency of forcing a 13-year-old child—a child—into carrying a baby to term? What will we say to the tortured and raped woman lying in the dark with a torn hymen, a broken jaw and green-and-blue bruises up and down her body? That she, too, must bear the penalty of her horror?

“Compassionate conservatism.” I am sick of the phrase. It has lost all meaning for me. I now dedicate myself to doing what I can for those women caught in a legislative hell that has no interest in their souls.

We will not return to the back-alley, wire-hanger abortions.

Deborah Morse-Kahn, Minneapolis, is a Minnesota author and researcher.