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Pregancy from rape is not God’s intent


By now you have heard of Richard Mourdock, the Indiana Republican Senate candidate who said in a debate:


The backlash from these comments have been swift and harsh. Mourdock was quick to distance himself from his comments. He stated that his comments were used to politically advantage his opponent. The problem with this whole story is not necessarily about abortion, but about rape. Did Mourdock mean that rape is intended to happen or that life is intended to happen?

At a dinner for GOP leaders Mourdock said:


Okay, stop right there. Did he just apologize for the controversy or his comments? Much like Todd Akin, the Missouri Senate GOP candidate who said “legitimate rape” rarely leads to pregnancies and the female body “shut that whole thing down”, is he minimizing his comments? . After the debate, Mourdock issued a brief statement and said:


Let it be said, rape is horrible. Rape is a crime. Rape is about evil power and control. God deplores rape. I can’t even believe I have to type those words to clarify what Christians should believe about the wrongness of rape. It’s troubling that a politician running for office either has such awful views on rape or has trouble articulating his policy clearly on a sensitive issue.

The CNN Belief blog has perhaps the most moving theological quote from a Catholic scholar:

Father Tom Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, said he found Mourdock’s comments troubling from a Catholic perspective because “God does not want rape to happen.” “Someone getting pregnant through rape simply means biology continues to function,” Reese said. “That doesn’t mean God wills it.

In 2001 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops revised their “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services”. Directive 36 states:

A female who has been raped should be able to defend herself against a potential conception from the sexual assault. If after appropriate testing, there is no evidence that conception has occurred already, she may be treated with medications that would prevent ovulation, sperm capacitation, or fertilization.

Even within the most pro-life religious communities, such as the Catholic Church, there is provision for opportunities to stop a pregnancy resulting from rape.

In the end, regardless of what you believe about abortion, we can all agree that such insensitive or poorly informed remarks do nothing to comfort those who are raped. We must treat such topics with the up-most compassion, understanding, and grace. We cannot continue to let right to life or freedom of health care issues be surrounded by such insensitivity. Let’s remember we are not talking about intangible political policy but real people with real problems.

Categories: God
Reverend Alan Rudnick

17 Responses

  1. Ann says:

    He really doesn’t apologize and he should. This was not an opinion he should have expressed in a public forum, particularly if he didn’t want to be associated as a person who thinks raped women shouldn’t be allowed to take steps to avoid becoming pregnant -whether it’s the day after pill or abortion.

    What gets me is ““I just struggled with it myself for a long time”. Really? It was a struggle to form an opinion on rape -which you’ve never experienced nor are at risk to -and the resulting pregnancy, which again you’ve never experienced and never will. Not to mention he’s never experience nor will how it feels to have a child that reminds you of a horrible rape and how to handle that. Or experienced adopting/raising a child that’s unwanted by it’s parents.

    Republicans need to stop talking about abortion. It’s law now and it’s not changing. You think life is precious? Go adopt one of those precious lifes.

  2. Albert J says:

    I don’t know how many bad examples it will take to convince some people that when they presume to speak “for God”, it rarely if ever turns out well.

  3. Scott says:

    I’ve raised a similar point before: If God “does not want rape to happen” then as an omnipotent and omniscient being, he certainly could prevent it.
    How does one get around that logical truism? God may very well allow evil in this world for some higher purpose, and he may allow humans “free will”. However, that’s just a different way of saying that God allows rape. To say otherwise would put limits on God’s power: He can’t get what he wants??

  4. Maria says:

    I can’t even think of words strong enough to comment on the absurdity of these people.

  5. iknowtruthismine says:

    The role of a god creature in the role of determining who is conceived by whatever means, is a nebulous idea to begin with. There are so many factors that go into determining what sperm cell meets what ova at what time, if at all, that the actions of just one man, or one incident in history can, within a short period of time of their influence, change the entire population of the world into a totally different population from that point on. Had Hitler, say, stuck his head up at the wrong moment while in the trenches during WWI, how long after his passing would the world schedule right down to the individual, been impacted so that none of the people subsequently conceived would have been those who in our reality were? Had the attempt on his life during the bomb attempt by the Valkyrie group been successful, virtually all children conceived on the planet from that point on (with exceptions for a time, in remote jungle, or tundra regions) would be different from those that now make up the population of the planet. This math holds up on the micro and macro level as well, with even the falling of a tree in the forest, having a potential to change what is and is not the direction reality takes. To assign a special condition to a god being, that would use rape as a determining factor in who should or should not be born, is ridiculous to the extreme.

  6. Jango Davis says:

    Two people having sex creates life, at which point does God get involved? At foreplay? Orgasim? We create life, we create death. Could a higher intelligence have set the whole universe in motion, certainly anything is possible, but basic biology is that it takes sperm and an egg to create life, not “God.” As far as I’m aware there is no supernatural being inhabiting my semen, no matter what I tell women on a Saturday night in a bar….

  7. Peter Bowden says:

    Hmmm…#3 is onto it. The senator’s comments are just a logical conclusion. Everything is God’s will…the rape, the pregnancy and the woman’s suffering.

    Is this a God you want to believe in?

  8. Troy Taxpayer says:

    Great post Reverend. This really cuts to the heart of the issue.

  9. ReepDaggle says:

    Chalk this up as one time we’re in complete agreement.

  10. Jackson Powers says:

    Mourdock is despicable as are the people who refuse to denounce him. His refusal to apologize and instead try to “clarify” his comment, while blaming those who criticized him for “misinterpreting” it is shameful, indicative that he and his remaining supporters have no concept of how hurtful that statement would be to rape victims and women as a whole. He may not have meant that God intends women to be raped, but he pretty much said that a woman who is raped and becomes pregnant should be forced to carry her rapist’s child to term because the rapist’s child is God’s blessing and that rape victim should just be so happy to be carrying out God’s intent. Awful.

  11. ReepDaggle says:

    While Democrats are by no means immune, Republicans seem to have come down with a serious case of collective foot in mouth disease. This close to Election Day, you gotta love it.

  12. iknowtruthismine says:

    The not so funny thing about the implications of positions of the plans of Mourdock, Paul Ryan and the Republican Party platform, is that in vitro fertilization to produce a pregnancy will not be allowed, but pregnancy by rape must be mandatorily carried out, with the state holding the figurative gun to the head of the rape victim to make her do it. I don’t know about you, but to me that is absolutely INSANE.

  13. Snicker Doodle says:

    According to Todd Akin, women can just shut that whole thing down if they are legitimately raped. If they did that, then there wouldn’t be any rape babies and what this doofus said would be moot. Come on women, get it together! Do a better job in shutting that whole thing down will you?
    Republicans crack me up. They all think they know what God thinks and wants for everyone. Amazing! I think they actually think they are God.

  14. Albert J says:

    I realize “walking past the cemetery” can be very stressful for some, but there is a limit to desparation. Inventing ridiculous, although creative, “implications of positions” that express your own exaggerations and fantacies only serves to make YOU look silly.

    I seem to remember a constant weeping that candidate Obama should/could not be held accountable for the gaggle of really stupid things former mentors, colleagues and supporters, including elected officials and Party leaders, said with some frequency during the 2008 campaign. Seems some have very short memories, or perhaps heightened worries.

  15. Jeanne says:

    This underscores the stupidity of some Republican congressmen. They assume that somehow … amazingly … the light switch is flipped and BAM! the woman is pregnant and she knows it. Actually, they all probably flunked high school biology because one spermatozoan(one of many that has been “launched,” so to speak) penetrates the egg, and the EGG is supposed to shut down all latecomers. Sometimes that doesn’t happen and the result is twins or triplets, etc.

    More importantly, the next morning after having sexual intercourse the woman RARELY knows that she is pregnant. She must wait until her next menstrual period, if that occurs on a regular basis, to decide if she may be pregnant. Even the over-the-counter pregnancy test kits suggest that you wait awhile before using the kit! (That is one of the reasons that the “rhythm method” has been called Vatican Roulette!)

    So, these Republican solons have determined that they are smarter and wiser than physicians and women and can adequately make laws that determine if a woman has done something evil and illegitimate, when they don’t even know the basics of human reproduction.

    Let us encourage them to do their jobs and pass spending bills, avoid the fiscal cliff, and get on with THEIR business instead of probing into the uterus of many women who do not want their attention.

  16. Albert J says:

    When did responsibility shift? At one time people were held responsible for what they said, because what they said was supposed to represent what they meant. If what was said turned out to misrepresent what was meant, people were given, some level, of opportunity to revise or clarify what they said.

    Today it seems like people are held responsible for what they say, based on what anybody, anywhere “thinks” might have been meant by the words spoken. No matter what anyone else chooses to imagine was meant, whether the speaker had any intention of that meaning or not, they are held responsible for the wildest perception of what anyone chooses to imagine.

    It’s not unusual, or should surprise anyone, but sometimes what people mean to say comes out entirely different from what they actually say. Other times people just say stupid things, and mean exactly what they say. If anyone is legitimately interested in undersdtanding what someone says, that may have been presented clumsily or wrong, you would think they’d be given the opportunity to clarify, so their actual meaning would be understood.

    Yet some, despite how many ever attempts to correct, clarify or explain, insist on repeating the original interpretation, that may have been categorically acknowledged as NOT representing what was intended. Others of course, search for inarticulate, or down right stupid, statements and then with nothing more substantial than their own imaginations, attribute what may have been said, no matter how often or how completely refuted, and attribute the meaning, that they alone may have created, to anyone, or scores of others, who had absolutely nothing to do with what was actually said, as if it were “etched in stone” fact.

    Saying something stupid, or having something said perceived, by someone, completely differently than you intended, is something EVERYONE of us has done, or has yet to do, or more likely both.

  17. iknowtruthismine says:

    Albert J – Never have I seen anyone go through such a pile of gobbledygook, to arrive at a justification for someone saying something so horrible and vile, that they should have been forced to shut down their effort to ‘represent’ people, minutes after they spoke it. We know EXACTLY what he meant, and all its implications.