Bill Napoli, a Republican State Senator in South Dakota, is a man who knows more about rape than I thought any mere man could know. He knows what real rape is; the kind of rape that would let the victim have an abortion under the new South Dakota law which only allows abortions when the pregnant woman's life is threatened:
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls "convenience." He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother's life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.
Bill NapoliBILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.
Butbutbut. Wouldn't this girl's life be threatened because she would try to commit suicide? And isn't that a really anti-life stance? Much better to put her into restraints for nine months and save two lives for Christ!
There are good women and then there are bad women. As Digby points out, bad women have abortions because they can't afford another child on top of the ones they already have trouble feeding. Good women have abortions because they were untouched religious virgins determined to save their hymen for their husbands and then they were viciously and extensively raped and got pregnant. It doesn't matter if they have lots of money to pay for childcare. Good women never wanted to have sex, good women are never atheists, and good women are never past their teenage years when they get raped. And anyone who has ever had consensual sex before is strong enough to carry the fruits of a violent rape to fruition. And sodomization must be a part of real rape, according to our Bill.
Imagine the hearings to decide if a raped-and-now-pregnant woman was young enough, virtuous enough, religious enough, determined enough to hold on to her hymen to be allowed to have an abortion. Imagine who would run these hearings: clones of Bill Napoli? Would the skin color of the woman matter in his calculations? Would the religion matter in these calculations? How many details of the actual rape would Napoli need to examine before he would decide which suicidal woman deserves life and which one does not?
This stuff makes me so sick. Go and read some actual descriptions of rape and what rape does to the women. Go and find out about the years of therapy bills and the medications and the razor blade safely hidden in the desk drawer for those really bad moments that come again and again. And then mail some of those stories to Bill Napoli.