From Rick@21:1/5 to All on Wed Dec 1 06:21:45 2021
Laws that prohibit abortion often contain an exclusion for rape or incest.
But rape is a crime that has to be adjudicated through the court system, and that can take several months or even years. So how does the rape exclusion work in actual practice?
Say a woman is raped and reports this to the police and she eventually
becomes pregnant. Let's say someone is actually arrested for the crime and
put on trial, which is expected to take longer than the period of her pregnancy. She lives in a restrictive abortion state where abortions are prohibited at whatever point she is in her pregnancy except for rape or
incest. So she goes to the doctor and asks for an abortion on the grounds
she was raped. Is she allowed to get a legal abortion just because she
says she was raped, even though no one has been convicted yet of the crime?
And if the person is eventually found not guilty, what happens then? Has
her previously legal abortion now become illegal because no one was
convicted of the crime?