WOMEN & FEMINISM
Creates high maternal mortality, escalating pregnancy deaths, and crippling protection for women and infants
The near totality of women feel benefitted by their decision
WIP
This book is way more comprehensive if you actually want to learn about the subject
Even if you are pro-life, you have to understand that legally calling abortion “murder” makes every single miscarriage technically “involuntary manslaughter” and can be subject to prosecution. in making abortion illegal, you are making miscarriage also illegal. this isn’t just hypothetical, this already happens:
Some basic arguments, outlined [better citation needed since I stole this from someone]:
The six week cutoff is entirely nonsensical, and not based in science a. The “heartbeat” detected at six weeks is not actually a heart b. “It’s not a fully formed heart… we can see it on the ultrasound, but it’s not a heart, a fully developed organ, by any means” - Dr. Rebecca Cohen, a professor at the University of Colorado c. In fact, at six weeks, it’s still an embryo - not even an actual fetus
The legislation in Alabama in particular is specifically and blatantly about controlling women a. Repbulican Clyde Chambliss, in response to the argument that fertilization clinics actually dispose of more fertilized eggs than abortion clinics, said that “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.”
Many anti-abortion lawmakers have demonstrated how little they understand the topic. a. MO Rep. Todd Atkin believes that women cannot be impregnated through rape b. TX Rep. Michael Burgess once argued that abortion should be banned at 15 weeks, because that’s when fetuses are capable of masturbation i. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/michael-burgess-fetus-masturbation/314146/ c. President Trump himself claimed that doctors often execute babies shortly after birth
It’s now highly possible that if a woman seeks option after being raped, she will be jailed for a longer time than her rapist a. In Alabama, abortion is a Class A felony, punishable by a minumum of ten years in prison. b. Rape and incest are Class C felonies, punishable by a maximum of ten years in prison
There are proven ways to reduce abortion - a ban on abortion isn’t the only route a. A report from the Guttmacher Institute found that countries with “robust women’s rights protections, liberal abortion laws, and easily accessible birth control… have some of the lowest abortion rates in the world.” i. Guttmacher Institute: Boonstra et al. 2006.
“The U.S. abortion rate began to fall after 1980, dropping more steeply after 1990 until it reached a rate of 21 abortions per 1,000 women in 2002—the lowest since 1974. Although the abortion rate among married women remained consistently low between 1981 and 2000, the rate for unmarried women fell sharply, from 50 per 1,000 women in 1981 to 34 in 2000 (Figure 3.3, page 17). A key factor behind this trend was increased contraceptive use… Thus, the increase in contraceptive use contributed significantly to the decrease in abortion rates among unmarried women.”
Well over 130 health and human rights organizations, led by the ACLU, have written to Congress to defend Planned Parenthood
a. The American College of Obstericians and Gynecologists, the largest group of reproductive health doctors in the U.S, is strongly pro-choice in its official statements.
While many studies manage to adjust for major factors in wage differences, there are too many minor factors to create a truly accurate picture and many major factors are directly detrimental to women’s ability to increase their income.
Rape reports are rarely false, and even stats like “2-10% are false” can still be put into more context. Much of this is credited to this thorough reddit post by u/LefthandedLunatic**
Most experts agree that false rape accusations make the total of 2-10% of the total accusations of rape. Here’s a few relevant, widely cited studies on the subject:
A multi-site study of eight U.S. communities including 2,059 cases of sexual assault found a 7.1% of false reports (Lonsway, Archambault, & Lisak, 2009).
A study of 136 sexual assault cases in Boston from 1998-2007 found a 5.9% of false reports (Lisak et al., 2010).
Using qualitative and quantitative analysis, researchers studied 812 reports of sexual assault from 2000-2003 and found a 2.1% of false reports (Heenan & Murray 2006).
2017 Study into the FBI Database found that between 2006 to 2010, the average number of false rape accusations or baseless accusations was 5.55%, and robbery had a similar false and baseless accusation rate at 5.76% (see Table 1)
A metastudy (those compile data from multiple studies) put the number of False Rape Accusations at 5%
2-10% seems rather common and enough to give anyone a pause considering how many false rape accusations that would mean once scaled up. But consider a few things.
When we consider just these 2 factors (total rapes and number reported), the stats around the subject change substantially.
Taking just these two factors into account, this study from 2010 says that “Although false allegations are 5% of all rapes reported to the police, the fact that at least 90% of rapes are never reported to the police (not just including college samples, and this is a conservative estimate) suggests that of all rapes (those reported and not reported to the police), 0.005% are false allegations.” While this study does assume a non-reported rate of 90% rather than 66%, it still really shows how much the stats can change by factoring these numbers in at all.
The answer is very low.
National Registry of Exoneration who keeps track of how many innocent people have been exonerated, and it found that since 1989 in the US, 52 people have been exonerated for sexual assault that they didn’t do. For comparison, 790 people were exonerated on false accusations of murder.
British Home Office did a detailed study and report on the issues of false rape accusations in 2005 and found that out of the 216 cases of rape that was false in the UK, 126 of them have a formal complain filed by the accuser, 39 of them had a named suspect and only 6 of them were arrested. Out of the 6 arrested, only 2 have charges and 0 of them had a conviction.
A study by the University of Pittsburgh found that only 18% of false rape accusations even name a suspect.
The fact of the matter is that the majority of false rape accusations don’t even name a suspect. And throwing this into the picture of the total of the numbers of rape really proves how rare false rape Convictions are. Vast majority of false rape accusers always accuse a non existent stranger who raped them and usually not someone specifically. Which means that beyond wasting time and resources majority of false rape accusations are harmless to the general public because no one person is accused.
When you take these numbers and add them to what we already know about rape, a more complete picture forms:
1/6 women claim to have experience sexual assault, follow by a 1/3 reporting the assault to police, then worst case scenario 1/10 are false. Out of those false rape accusations 18/100 name a suspect, out of false rape accusations that accuse someone 15/100 get an arrest, and out of those who are arrested only 1/3 have charges placed against them.
So 1/6 x 1/3 x 1/10 x 18/100 x 15/100 x 1/3 = 0.00005
This means out of all the women you meet, you have a 0.005% chance of being falsely charged of rape.
Compare this to the fact that 6.4% of men openly admitted of committing the strictest possible definition of rape (and 23% of that 6.4% admitted to multiple rapes) or the fact that men are more likely to be raped than falsely accused of rape. Maybe people alleging a false accusation epidemic are focusing on the wrong problems here.
Please note that this subsection in its current form sucks and really needs revisiting
Many people who fear false rape accusations claim that women in the workforce will make a false accusation against a man in a higher position, or a student who is going to fail an exam will accuse a professor, or that a vengeful ex makes a false accusation, or a woman who regretted sex later. But the reality of this is very surprising.
A review done by the LAPD found the reasons for a false rape accusations is unwanted pregnancies or more commonly “missed curfews” by young teenagers. It turns out that 55% of False Rape Accusations according to this review are for hope of getting medical care or psychiatric medication by the very poor and destitute
Also it is noted that half of the false accusations are made by parents of children, either by pressuring the child to go to the police or accusing someone of rape without the child knowing. It is also important to note that the rare Serial False Rape Accusers tend to have a history of being a legitimate victim of sexual abuse as a child.
As this shows that the majority of the time, false accusers aren’t the serial accusers we hear on the media nor are in tech jobs, nor college students who regret sex. Instead it is usually either the very poor looking for free medication, teenagers trying to get out of trouble and parents of children.
Also there are no correlations with the age of the accusation or the number of sexual partners of the accuser and whether their accusations are true or not. Add this to the fact that most legitimate victims lie to themselves and others saying that they weren’t sexually assaulted when they really were. This denial often is due to the fact that the majority of victims know their abusers personally before the assault and often change their stories or denied that they were as a way to cope with the trauma.