An indecent mandate

Our new Arkansas anti-abortion law requires raped women to bring the rapist’s seed to term.

The state can’t address the violated woman’s pain, medical vulnerabilities and emotional stress, but it can and should compensate her for the expenses she will encounter over the course of nine months and until she is permitted to put the child up for adoption— or chooses not to.

The woman’s emotional turmoil is beyond my ability to comprehend. But as a father of three, I’m familiar with the dollar costs of bringing a pregnancy to term and supporting the newborn’s early childhood.

By what moral or ethical standard do our legislators, do we, avoid the responsibility of compensating the rape victim for at least the dollar cost of everything she must buy, every bill she must pay, every day of lost wages to enforce the state’s mandate?

Is not, in fact, the developing embryo/fetus a ward of the state? It is implicitly declared to be human, its continued existence and welfare is ordered and protected by the state under penalty of law, and its birth mother has no choice under penalty of law but to be its guardian.

This legislation must be changed to fully support the victims of rape, or to exclude them from its provisions. I prefer exclusion. For consider, thoughtful reader, can you think of any other instance in our law wherein a victim of violent crime is not allowed to heal, to restore, or is so deeply and intimately burdened by compliance?

Those are the options. The victims of rape must be either fully supported by our state or they must be excluded from the demands this legislation is making on their lives. There is no decent or honorable alternative. RANDALL WARD Springdale