A British man is being accused of forcing a young woman to abort his child after he sexually abused her for more than a decade.
Sajid Bostan is on trial for charges of rape, attempted rape and indecent assault after he allegedly sexually abused the teenage girl from 1990 to 2001, the Rotherham Advertiser reports.
The woman, now 36, told a court Wednesday that Bostan forced her to have an abortion when she was about 20 years old.
“That’s when things started going bad,” the woman told the court. “He came to the house I was living at and took me up to the hospital in Doncaster to make sure I went for my appointments [at the abortion clinic].”
The woman said she began a “relationship” with Bostan when she was 15 because she “just wanted attention at the time.” Bostan and Arshid Hussain allegedly teamed up to rape the young woman several times, according to the report. Bostan was married and had three children at the time, the report states.
The two men appeared to be extremely manipulative of the young woman, who described herself as lonely. At one point, the woman said Hussain poisoned her pet cats. The two men also allegedly forced her to have sex with other men and to store guns and drugs at her parent’s home.
“I wasn’t in a good way,” she said. “I had gone back into heroine and I was using about £10 worth a day.”
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The woman told the court that she did not want an abortion, but Bostan forced her to have one. While the woman admitted that she had no desire for a child, she said she would not have aborted her baby – “because I didn’t want to go through all that.”
Hussain and Bostan both say they are not guilty, according to the report.
The young woman’s response to the alleged forced abortion echoes how many other sexual assault victims have described abortion. Most women who become pregnant through sexual assault say abortion only added to their trauma, according to research by the Elliot Institute.
Amy Sobie, editor of The Post-Abortion Review, explained more:
Typically, people on both sides of the abortion debate accept the premise that most women who become pregnant through sexual assault want abortions. From this “fact,” it naturally follows that the reason women want abortions in these cases is because it will help them to put the assault behind them, recover more quickly, and avoid the additional trauma of giving birth to a “rapist’s child.”
But in fact, the welfare of a mother and her child are never at odds, even in sexual assault cases. As the stories of many women confirm, both the mother and the child are helped by preserving life, not by perpetuating violence.
… although many people believe that abortion will help a woman resolve the trauma of rape more quickly, or at least keep her from being reminded of the rape throughout her pregnancy, many of the women in our survey who had abortions reported that abortion only added to and accentuated the traumatic feelings associated with sexual assault.
