What Really Happened With Agata? Here's What *Didn't* Happen

It's very difficult to piece everything together. There's a prolife and a prochoice version of the story.

But this month a 14 year old girl in Poland, identified in the press only by the pseudonym "Agata," had an abortion after being raped by a boy at her school and becoming pregnant.

Public furor raged over whether or not the girl had the individual right to have the abortion. Much has been made of the role of a prominent prochoice advocacy group in arranging the abortion, and about the prolife activists who sought to dissuade the young woman from having an abortion. Each enemy camp has accused the other of besieiging and pressuring her.

What really happened? I don't know, and there are a lot of things here that only time can tell, and some things that the world may never know. But it's very clear what *didn't* happen.

There has been no evidence that these selfsame interest groups are bombarding the rapist with their attentions, or imploring church and state re: his deed.

No evidence that anyone is focusing on the urgent need for boys and men to stop treating girls and women as disposable, inert pieces of meat, and finally learn to treat us as the inviolate, sacred beings all of us human beings are.

No one questions the one who committed the rape, let alone the deeply entrenched social institutions (not simply in Poland but everywhere) making his crime possible and keeping him under the radar, while national and global fury surrounds his two victims, the young woman and the child she conceived through his violence.

No one questions the violence behind the abortion. (Is there any clearer evidence that violence begets violence?)

As if rape were an eternal verity, an inevitability: either girls and women must have access to (the no matter how heart-shattering, lifetaking procedure of) abortion because there is rape and therefore abortion for always and forever...or the flip side of this: girls and women must endure, endure, endure the Salvific Pain of carrying children whose biological fathers are rapists.

Once again, males and masculinist institutions escape accountability for their crimes. And who takes the brunt of their actions?

Why, the same human beings who always are expected to take it. And take it, and take it, and take it, world without end....

No one is even asking, why didn't this young woman get the prompt emergency treatment all raped women need, including emergency contraception--what stopped that from happening? But that's too close to the crux of the matter: why the hell is there rape and why the hell is it allowed to continue...?

Endorse UNIFEM's "Say NO to Violence Against Women" Petition

UNIFEM, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, has launched a global petition, "Say NO to Violence Against Women."

As well as being a major, widespread human rights violation in and of itself, violence against women is a major cause of abortion worldwide. It often begins or escalates during pregnancy. Women may be outright and directly forced to abort their pregnancies, or be subjected to so many miseries, they cannot envision a different way.

And violence against women is a major reason why women are deprived of their right to make nonviolent choices, such as whether or not to have sex, and with whom, and whether or not to prevent conception, and how. Violence against women violates women's (as well as unborn children's right) to bodily integrity, and often violates women's (as well as unborn children's) right to life itself.

If you are a pregnant--or nonpregnant, for that matter--woman who has been or is subjected to violence, please visit our Mother & Child Health page(direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/motherchildhealth.html) . It lists sources of help for problems with Domestic Violence/Abuse (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/motherchildhealth.html#dv.html).

Our Pregnancy Prevention page (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/preventionallways.html)offers resources on Rape & Incest Treatment & Prevention (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/preventionallways.html#rape).

And of course, one of the deepest solutions for violence against women resides in greater Male Resonsibility (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/maleresponsibility.html).