Rebecca Kiessling is an attorney who fights against rape exceptions in abortion bans—a strategy to curtail reproductive rights. A child of rape herself, Kiessling has said that she’s “a living embodiment of what is at stake.”
Although pro-life leaders are among the loudest advocates for mothers who were raped, the movement to strengthen victims’ parental rights has champions on both sides of the abortion debate. The Obama-era initiative was introduced by the Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a pro-choice Democrat, and it received bipartisan support in the House and the Senate.
One morning at Kiessling’s home, I met Ahmad, who belongs to the support group for mothers. A veteran of the Army Reserves, Ahmad alleges that she became pregnant, in 2014, after an ex-boyfriend—also her former unit commander—sexually assaulted her. She went through with the pregnancy and gave birth to a daughter in 2015. “When she was born, I didn’t know what to think,” Ahmad told me. “Because this is my child, but this is also my permanent connection to him.
The women on the support-group call echoed Prewitt’s complaints. “The message should be ‘Punish the rapist,’ ” Teresa said. “Not ‘Abort! Abort! Abort! Or else you’re going to have to share custody.’ ” Kiessling had testified at the invitation of the bill’s sponsor, a state representative named Rachel Rodriguez-Williams, who runs a crisis-pregnancy center in Cody, Wyoming. Their abortion ban passed handily in Wyoming’s state senate, but, in a final review of the bill, a pro-choice Republican had proposed adding exceptions for the “very egregious circumstances” of rape and incest. The amendment squeaked by, fifteen to fourteen, after one pro-life state senator was excused from the vote.
As a law student at Wayne State, in the early nineties, Kiessling converted to Catholicism and wrote a forty-three-page “Philosophical Abortion Essay.” The paper, now posted on her Web site with a note warning students not to plagiarize, concludes, “It is an indisputable fact that an unborn child is a living human being since no human ‘fetus’ has ever been known to develop into a dolphin, a rabbit, or a carrot.
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