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Rape and Abortion in the Animal Kingdom

Rape and Abortion in the Animal Kingdom

Rape is common among animals.

Biologists call it sexual coercion so that we have a fancy and less offensive term to use, but the fact of the matter is that it’s animal rape.

Females of several mammalian and primate species possess a suite of physiological adaptations that can ultimately result in abortions; however, it isn’t a cognitive process. The body can recognize that something isn’t right, whether that’s the timing, the partner, or something else.

This is called the Bruce effect.

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In primates, when a new alpha male comes into a population, females who are pregnant generally experience spontaneous abortions. Evolution has designed this system to be sensitive to the fact that the new alpha will kill all the babies and make his own. It’s essentially saving the female time and energy that she would otherwise put into a doomed offspring.

Female humans who are raped and become pregnant should, without any question, have the choice of how to proceed with this physiological transformation. What laws fail to consider is that such females will never return to their pre-biologically altered state.

When pregnant women have high levels of stress, the effects are detrimental to both mom and babe. Our bodies have a lot of buffers, so stress won’t generally cause serious problems like birth defects, but it can impact that baby’s reactivity to stress and the care that mom is able to provide.

Motherhood is the most massive biological undertaking that any female mammal can accomplish. No one should have a say in the progression of a pregnancy except for the female who is experiencing it.