Crystal Blount, Raped at 14, Protected Her Baby

Abortion restrictions (including funding) usually contain exceptions for rape, incest, and risk to the mother’s life.

The risk/danger exception is understandable. People have a right to protect their own lives, to defend themselves. Some might risk carrying a life-threatening pregnancy to term, but it’s a decision for that woman to make. But rape or incest? If the risk of dying or permanent injury is low, comparable to any other healthy pregnancy, how the baby was conceived should not lower the value of his life.

An older high school boy raped author and speaker Crystal Blount when she was 14. She became pregnant and planned to kill her baby. Her father insisted that she kill his grandchild because of the way the baby was conceived. Blount said “he felt ashamed of his failure to protect me, and the family name,” and she was ashamed for what happened, though it wasn’t her fault. From Life News:

Here’s where it gets good: on the way to the second appointment, I heard God tell me that her blood was innocent, and to take his hand. I asked my Dad to stop the car and said I didn’t know what I would do (keep the baby or adoption), but that I would accept the task of carrying the child until she was born — to choose LIFE for her. I felt overcome with a duty to protect this helpless life growing inside me. I had seen her heartbeat. I knew instantly in that car, that it wasn’t her fault, no matter who fathered her; even if he had just been a deadbeat dad. I knew then it was my duty and God would somehow give me the strength to bring her into the world.

I did just that, and with the help of counselors, I chose open adoption for my daughter. I picked her parents — a couple married many years who tried for seven years to have a family. She’s an honors student now, and graduating high school in three weeks — one entire year early at the age of 16. She has been accepted to four colleges, and wants to become an ER trauma surgeon one day.

A selfless decision. The baby, no matter how he was conceived, doesn’t have to die.

“We each have our own lives to live — each of us who have been given the chance at life that is. I want all unborn babies to have a chance at life, no matter what any of us has done — no matter what mistakes I made, or whatever mistakes the man who raped me made.”