If you turn on the political pundit shows these days, or watch discussion trends on Facebook, there's an awful lot of talk about rape. Rape, rape, rape, rape... It's both amazing and disgusting. Why is this? It's because of the discussions revolving around abortion and the exception for victims of rape and incest. Most any person with any sort of moral core would agree that a woman who becomes pregnant due to rape should not be required to carry the pregnancy to term.

Because of this presumed exception, Republicans have been trying to narrow the definition of rape. They've also been trying to imply that pregnancies due to rape are so rare as to be practically non-existent, so an exception is unnecessary. Here's a chart from this Daily Kos entry which fairly sums up the worst of the comments:



Rachel Maddow has also commented on the practical/logistical application of a "rape-only" exception to abortion: How would that be enforced? Would a woman need to bring a police report to the doctor's office? What if a woman didn't want to file charges?

All of this, though, is a red-herring argument. It is a re-framing of the discussion. There's one thing that's very important to remember:

Abortion is a medical procedure that has been legally protected by the Supreme Court. It is a 14th Amendment right.

All of this discussion regarding "exceptions for rape" is giving credit to the notion that denying a woman the right to terminate a pregnancy for any reason is a legitimate political position. It's an attempt to slide the window to the side of banning abortion in some cases. It assumes that banning it is inevitable. It assumes that banning it in some (or even most) cases is acceptable.

It is not.

Abortion on demand is a legally protected right that can only be taken away via a constitutional amendment. The only amendment that has ever been ratified to restrict personal liberties was Prohibition, and that was later revoked. Republicans know they can't create a law to ban abotions, so they have been pushing for a constitutional amendment to do so. It seems inconceivable that it would make it through Congress and end up on the ballot in all 50 states, and even if it did, it seems extremely unlikely that it would get enough votes to be ratified.

So why does all this matter?

It matters because it cheapens the discourse. It reduces women to breeding stock, places them in an inferior position compared to men. Minorities in general and women in particular have faced a long hard uphill struggle in America to reach equality. To rephrase the Declaration of Independence, we should be at a place where the notion is that all people are created equal, and more so assumed to be equal. Dismissing a woman's right to her own body goes against the very core of what our forefathers fought for.

So while we can all agree that a politician trying to parse rape should be forced into early retirement, let's not let the discussion be pivoted from what's really at stake here: A woman's right to control her own life.