DO, I realise that you must defend the religion you've chosen to take to your heart, and in which you believe sincerely. However, I'm more than happy to take a humanist position on the score of enforced maternity, or pretty much any issue, come to that.
If you can imagine the raping take place in Darfur, for example, where poor village girls are taken by rebel troops and repeatedly raped over and over - imagine, if you possibly can, that you are one of these youngsters. Imagine being penetrated repeatedly by your community's enemy, with brutality, insults, and the complete abandonment to your fate, as your family is probably already massacred. Now imagine you find you're pregnant - God knows by whom, because you've been sexually battered so much it could be by one of any hundred. All you are is the biological result of a ripe egg being fertilised by some stranger's sperm. Not someone you love, want to marry, are married to, want to have children with. It's not the 'fault' of the sperm, or the egg, or the embryo. That's just biology. It is, however, the brutish, criminal activity of one of what may be many, many men. It's not God's gift of a little ray of sunshine or any such sentimental stuff. It's just a biological event caused under extreme duress, emotional anguish, and probably considerable physical discomfort. What it isn't, is wanted. The girls in this example are raped by men not from their tribe - imagine, if you will, then, your townswomen and their daughters repeatedly being raped by complete outsiders - just because people are of the same colour, as we've discussed on here already, doesn't make them 'your people'. So imagine your neighbouring women, your own family's women, taken and raped over and over by, oh, let's say, Nazi skinheads. They're white, and they even speak English, but they're not 'your people'. Now imagine your daughter and your neighbour's daughters becoming pregnant by these men.
The Church would put the continued pregnancy before any consideration for these unwilling mothers' enforced pregnancies, deliveries, milk production, likely post-natal depression, and very likely failure to bond. It's quite possibly because the Church is patriarchal to the point of mysogyny that it can sit back in complete ignorance of the needs of motherhood: one is usually fairly basic, and that's that you conceive a child by someone you love, often when you both want it, to love it together, nurture it, and see it grow up together. Your Church would have these girls - possibly as young as 13 - take on single parenting roles in their own childhood or teenage years. Now, would you want this fate for your own daughter?
There are tens of thousands of abortions round the world every year, vast amounts of them occurring in Catholic countries through illegal abortionists. The Church has failed to stem the tide of unwanted children, because it refuses to acknowledge any form of contraception. One little phrase in the Bible has condemned millions of women to overbreed themselves to an early grave, to die having their uteruses pierced by knitting needles or coat hangers, to abandon their babies or young children, or to sell them for almost any purpose. We all know damn well that the Catholic rich buy their contraceptive products and limit their children (hence the decline in the birthrate in Italy since the 1970s) - not by the unreliable rhythm method, but through pharmaceuticals, and can afford a high-class, medically-trained abortionist if one's needed to correct the odd accident.
Where's the morality in any of that, when it's all due to the ridiculous posturing of a patriarchal establishment, smug in the knowledge that none of its priests or Popes will ever be pushing out their 14th child; or will be a frightened rural girl, up the duff and hustled out of her community, wondering how she'll cope; or one of the thousands of recent rape victims, aghast they now carry some savage stranger's child within?
You say it's God's word, but I say there is no God, so as far as I'm concerned it's 'not in my name' to your Church's pontifications.
