I was conceived when a violent serial rapist broke into my mother's home in 1983. She was advised to abort. She chose life. I found out when I was twelve.
If you are reading this because you were conceived the same way, or because you are carrying a child conceived this way, or because someone you love is — I want you to have something better than a debate. I want you to have the facts, and I want you to have them from someone who is inside this, not observing it.
This page is what I wish someone had handed me at twelve.
More often than the phrase "rare exception" suggests.
In that same study, roughly a third of the women did not discover they were pregnant until the second trimester. About 32% carried and kept their child, about 6% placed for adoption, about 50% had an abortion, and about 12% miscarried.
I want to sit on that a moment, because it is the number nobody quotes: close to four in ten of these pregnancies ended with a child being born and raised or placed. Those are not hypothetical children. We are a group of people large enough to fill a city, and we are almost never asked what we think about the law that was written with us in mind.
Tens of thousands of pregnancies a year is not a footnote. And the number that matters to a person is one. Whatever the incidence rate, if it is you, it is 100%.
Sometimes it is, and I will never speak with contempt about a woman who chose it — I had my own abortion at seventeen. But the research does not show a population that uniformly wanted it. Half of the women in the Holmes study did not have an abortion. In a separate national study of women who did have abortions, about 1% reported having been raped and fewer than 0.5% reported incest. The rape exception is written as though it governs a large share of abortions. It does not.
This is the one that hurt me most, because I believed it about myself for years. Here is what I know now: I am not an echo of what happened to my mother. I am a separate person who happened to arrive through the worst day of her life. My mother needed real support, real justice, and real healing. What she did not need was for anyone to treat me as her wound instead of her daughter.
People ask me this a lot, usually gently. What I actually carry is more complicated than hate, and I have found that trying to force it into a clean shape does not help. A crime was committed. It was not committed by me, and it was not committed by my mother. Both of those facts sit still once you stop arguing with them.
It nearly did — not because of the fact itself, but because of the shame I built around it and the silence I kept it in. What changed was not the fact. It was being known anyway. That is why I talk about this in public now: the silence did far more damage to me than the truth ever did.
I am not going to pretend I know what your situation costs you, and I am not going to hand you a slogan. A few things I would say if we were sitting together:
You are allowed to feel more than one thing at once. You are allowed to not know yet. You are allowed to get help for the assault itself — medical, legal, emotional — separately from any decision about the pregnancy, and you deserve all of it regardless of what you decide.
And whatever you decide, you will still be a person worth loving on the other side of it. I need you to hear that from someone who has been on both sides of this story.
There are people whose entire job is to help you, confidentially, right now — including people who will help you with no expectation about what you choose.
My apostolate is called Beyond the Exception, and the name is the argument. In almost every debate about abortion, children conceived in rape are the group that gets traded away first — by opponents as a decisive case, and sometimes by allies as a reasonable concession. I am what gets conceded.
I am not interested in winning that exchange by being angry about it. I am interested in what happens when someone conceded in the abstract turns out to be sitting in the room.
If that is useful to your conference, campus, parish, or event, I would be glad to come.