The United States is currently the site of a slow, grinding massacre. The numbers are not a secret. They are printed in black and white by the very agencies tasked with public health. Women are reportedly raped at a rate of seventy-eight per hour. That is more than one every minute. It adds up to six hundred and eighty-three thousand rapes per year. In the same timeframe, the CDC reports roughly six hundred and nine thousand abortions.
The “pro-life” movement has a problem with math. They scream about the sanctity of life. They wave signs, they blockade clinics, they pass laws that strip women of their autonomy. They claim to be the defenders of the innocent. But they are strangely silent about the other six hundred and eighty-three thousand victims. They do not march for the women who are being hunted in the streets. They do not fundraise for the women whose lives are shattered by sexual violence. They do not demand justice for the ones who are treated like collateral damage in a war they did not ask for.
The reason is simple. They are not pro-life. They are pro-control.
To understand the present, we have to look at the history of the body. For centuries, the law did not view rape as a crime against a woman. It viewed it as a crime against property. A woman was a vessel. She belonged to her father until she belonged to her husband. Rape was not an assault on her humanity. It was a theft of value from the man who owned her. The damage was to his asset, not her soul. The legal system was built to protect the owner, not the victim.
That system has not been dismantled. It has just been rebranded.
We treat sexual violence as a nuisance. We treat it as an unfortunate side effect of “boys being boys.” The police departments that are supposed to serve and protect instead serve as a barrier to justice. They investigate the victim’s clothing, her alcohol intake, her sexual history. They look for a reason to blame her. They look for a reason to close the file. This is not incompetence. It is policy. It is a feature of a system that wants women to remain afraid.
The most terrifying number is not in the police reports. It is the hidden number. The six hundred and eighty three thousand rapes are just the ones that were reported. The vast majority of women never speak. They never call the police. They never go to the hospital. They suffer in the dark because they know the truth. They know that the system will punish them for their own victimization.
This silence is the second crime.
The anti-choice crowd loves to talk about God’s plan. They love to talk about the miracle of birth. But what is God’s plan for a woman who is violently assaulted? What is the miracle in forcing a woman to carry the child of her rapist? That is not compassion. That is sadism. It is the ultimate assertion of ownership. It is the state saying, “We will not protect you from the predator. But we will force you to bear the consequences of his violence.”
They are building a society where the fetus has more rights than the woman carrying it. They are building a society where a corpse has more bodily autonomy than a living, breathing woman. You cannot harvest organs from a corpse without prior consent. But you can force a woman to incubate a child against her will. The logic is twisted. The morality is dead.
This is not about abortion. It is about subjugation. They want to return to a time when a woman’s body was not her own. They want to return to the time when the rape victim was just damaged goods. They use the language of faith to mask the reality of their hate. They use the banner of morality to justify the cruelty.
The math does not lie. Seven hundred thousand rapes. Six hundred thousand abortions. The “pro-life” movement looks at both numbers and decides to attack the women. They decide to strip away the one escape hatch a terrified woman has left. They are not saving lives. They are ensuring that the suffering continues. They are turning the United States into a graveyard of female potential.
We must stop pretending this is a debate about ethics. This is a war. And the bodies of women are the battlefield. The only way to win is to stop letting them hide behind their crosses. We have to call it what it is. A calculated effort to keep women terrified, subservient, and pregnant. It is the return of the property line. And the chain is tightening.
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An extremely well written, powerful, terse article on an issue that has been used to corrupt our nation’s politics for the last 50+ years. Thank you. Since the passage of Dobbs, I have been working on a much more in depth article– some writing, but mostly just gathering a very wide variety of relevant articles, about recent and historical, related content. I would love to see your opinion piece reach a wider audience. Again, very well done. -Richard
Thank you for reading, Richard!
Please feel free to use my accredited words in any such research and publications. And thank you for your part in this fight.
Matt