Originally Posted by TSGracchus

But in cases of accidental pregnancy where abortion is even considered, that is also the case.

It's rather a stretch in any case. I've always felt that an exception for rape or incest, if one is going to buy into the arguments in favor of an abortion ban to start with, is not defensible. A long time ago, I read an article by someone who put it this way (I may not recall the exact language, of course), and I found it impossible to refute (except by refuting the underlying anti-choice premise itself):

"Would you force a woman to bear the child of a rapist? No, the rapist did that. All I would do is prevent her from compounding the rapist's crime with an even more serious one: murder."

And although a danger to the mother's mental health is certainly possible if she becomes pregnant through rape, it is by no means a given, and -- assuming, again, that we're convinced an embryo is a person -- surely it would make more sense to deal with any such danger through counseling rather than through abortion.

To me, someone who calls abortion "murder," but also calls for allowing it in cases of rape, is showing that he or she doesn't really mean that abortion is murder. This idea is not giving the crime of "murder" the seriousness it merits.

As for incest, there's a genetic danger to the child itself, but that isn't a certainty, either, and can be medically detected nowadays fairly early in the pregnancy.