Thirty-three years ago I was raped. My attacker broke into my bungalow in the middle of the night and assaulted me at knifepoint. I didn’t know him and he wasn’t caught.

Until recently, I hadn’t thought about this event for months and sometimes years. The Republican Party’s platform on the sanctity of human life brought it back to me in vivid detail: my rapist’s silhouette in my bedroom door, his voice, his smell, my panic and the fear I felt until he left my house and for many months after. The anger, fear, guilt and grief came back in an overwhelming rush and have not left my mind.

I was lucky. I didn’t get pregnant and I didn’t get a disease. Others have not done as well.

According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, www.rainn.org, every two minutes someone in the United States is sexually assaulted. Eighty percent are under 30, 44 percent are under 15, and 90 percent are women. Most people were raped by someone they knew, meaning that they likely have to face their attacker for years to come. And, shockingly, many rapes go unreported and most rapists are never punished.

Unfortunately, the Republican Party’s platform does not protect the victims of rape and incest. Instead it states that “the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed” and it supports “a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorses legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.”

In fact, what this means is that the Republican Party holds the life of a woman or child who has been impregnated by rape or molestation by a father, brother or cousin in lower esteem than that of an embryo that has been forcibly placed in her body. Vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan has described rape as simply an alternate means of conception.

Unless you have gone through the experience of rape or molestation, there is no way that you can fathom the psychological damage it inflicts. Victims of these assaults are more prone to depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, drug addiction and suicidal thoughts than other segments of the population. Now imagine that you are forced to be reminded of your trauma every day through a nine-month pregnancy, never knowing who the father of your child is or, if you do know, realizing that you have not only been forced to bring to life the product of a violent and unbidden act, you may continue to face the perpetrator for years to come. Your pregnancy would become a shame rather than a joy and a burden rather than a blessing.

As Paul Ryan stated in his vice presidential acceptance speech, civilized societies are judged by the ways that they treat their most vulnerable members. I suggest that those vulnerable individuals are people who are alive in this moment of time, and they are the ones who deserve protection. Unless we respect the lives of women and children in our society who are victims of sexual assault and treat their experiences and bodies as their own, we have no right to speak about the sanctity of human life. The lives of victims have sanctity. How we choose to heal ourselves and live our lives following an assault should be our choice and not the decision of government.

Barbara Goldstein is San Jose’s public art director. She wrote this for this newspaper.