More frequently than many might expect, an abortion is forced upon two victims – the mother and her unborn child.
In cases of sexual assault, women and girls often are forced or coerced with threats and violence to abort their unborn babies. Such was the case with a young New Zealand woman whose father sexually abused her for about 10 years.
Stuff New Zealand reports the young woman has an intellectual disability. In 2005, when she was 18, she moved into her father’s home in North Island, the report states.
For the next decade, her father, 56, physically and sexually abused her, according to the report. Neither the victim nor her father are named in reports to protect the young woman’s privacy.
In 2016, authorities said they discovered the abuse when the young woman went to a local hospital for an abortion.
Here’s more from the report:
Over a decade, the father kept her isolated and often subjected her to violence before sexual intercourse.
“A child of a parent is entitled to – even in later years – the protection, love, and support of a parent, not physical and sexual abuse,” Judge Glen Marshall told the father at his sentencing.
Crown prosecutor Jacinda Foster said her research had not uncovered other incest cases with this level of violence.
“He dominated her life for an extended period.
“There was no kind of loving or supportive or caring nature about this relationship.”
The woman is on the borderline of being classed as intellectually disabled and did not have the capacity or support network to rebuff her father or remove herself from the situation, Foster said.
SUPPORT PRO-LIFE NEWS! Please help LifeNews.com with a donation
The young woman had two abortions during the period of abuse, one in 2008 and one in 2016. According to the court, they could not prove that the first abortion was a result of rape by her father.
When the young woman had the second abortion, court records indicate she told a hospital counselor about the abuse she suffered by her father.
On Thursday, the father was sentenced to five years and five months in prison in the Hamilton District Court, according to the report.
Sexual abuse and abortion frequently are connected. A 2014 study published in PLOS Medicine found that 25 percent of women who had abortions faced some sort of abuse beforehand, either physical, sexual or emotional.
Sometimes abusers also use abortions to cover up their crimes, making unborn babies second victims in a number of sexual abuse cases.
In an Ohio case, a 22-year-old soccer coach was convicted of sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl on his team, LifeNews reported. According to reports, he statutorily raped the girl; and when she became pregnant, he took her to Planned Parenthood to abort their unborn baby and cover up what he had done. The Ohio Planned Parenthood also faced a lawsuit for failing to report the sexual abuse of the young girl.
In an Arizona case, officials said another Planned Parenthood center failed to provide the proper report to authorities about a victim of a young man accused of being a serial rapist. Not only did Planned Parenthood fail to report the rape but, in so doing, it allowed the rapist to rape 18 or more teenage girls, authorities said, making it so the abortion company is partially responsible for victimizing them as well.
Planned Parenthood abortion clinics have come under fire numerous times for not reporting cases of statutory rape to authorities as required by state law. In September 2015, Alliance Defending Freedom released a report cataloging multiple instances of Planned Parenthood performing abortions on sexually abused minors and failing to report the abuse to authorities as required by law. Affiliates of Planned Parenthood Federation of America instead accepted money for the abortions and allowed the rapists to roam free without any notification to the proper authorities.
