Power

Rick Santorum Thinks Abortions Just “Traumatize” Rape Victims

Santorum has said abortion should be flatly banned, even in cases of rape or incest, and doctors who perform abortions should face criminal charges. Last week, Rick Santorum took it up a notch.

Walking anal sex joke (Google: “Santorum”) and Republican presidential wannabe Rick Santorum, although massively lagging behind in the polls, appears to be competing with Bachmann and Perry in the far-right “ludicrous statement du jour” department on the issue of abortion.

The former Senator and GOP presidential candidate is renowned for offering stunningly maximalist positions on abortion. In the past, Santorum said abortion should be flatly banned, even in cases of rape or incest, and doctors who perform abortions should face criminal charges. Okay, we get it–Rick Santorum loves fetuses more than hate group special-interest money.

Last week, Rick Santorum took it up a notch at the Republican presidential debate in Iowa.

“Would you allow no exceptions for cases of rape on incest?” Fox News host, Byron York asked. “Polls have shown that large majorities of Americans support some exceptions for abortion. Are your views too much, even for many conservatives to support?”

“That child is an innocent victim,” Santorum replied. “To be victimized twice would be a horrible thing. It is an innocent human life, genetically human from the moment of conception. We in America should be big enough to try to surround ourselves and help women in those terrible situations who have been traumatized already. To put them through another trauma of an abortion, I think is too much to ask. So I would absolutely stand and say that one violence is enough.”

So, not only does the former Senator and GOP presidential candidate believe that a woman has absolutely no say in extreme cases such as rape or incest, but he also believes that the rape victim is way too traumatized to make such a consideration.

Once again, we’re bombarded with a reactionary male who flagrantly injects his own perverse religious thinking into an area about which he personally knows little, if anything. Perhaps the former Senator should imagine one of his daughters being sexually assaulted and then told by her attacker that she mustn’t tell anyone or she will be in danger. So she doesn’t tell anyone and in the meantime, her rapist’s child is developing inside of her. Yet she still doesn’t tell anyone. The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network estimates that, out of 64,080 reported rapes of victims 13 years or older from 2004-2005, 3,204 pregnancies resulted.

But instead of looking to find solutions that seek to fight the social ills that lead to abortion, Rick Santorum would rather allow the far-right’s extreme black and white, Manichean views on abortion and attack the women who seek them.