The Christian Science Monitor ran a great article last week about the challenges faced by women who choose to give birth to and raise children conceived in rape. Unfortunately, laws are often slanted toward abortion or adoption, even if those aren’t what the mother wants:

It’s more common for states to provide rape survivors with emergency contraception, easier access to abortion, or quick termination of parental rights of the father when the child is being given up for adoption. While some women choose those paths, sometimes because the thought of the child triggers a replay of the trauma, the Hope group says it’s important that society not stereotype rape survivors and end up ostracizing women who choose to keep their children. “People ridicule you and distrust you because you chose to have your child – ‘Oh, you must not have been raped,’ ” Megison says. “It’s such a strange world we live in where you have to be questioned as a mother why you love the child that … you nurse and play with and pray with and read stories with.”

Hope After Rape Conception is an organization that was formed by women who had to fight rapists for custody of their children or grandchildren. They’ve written model legislation to terminate rapists’ parental rights, and are trying to get it passed in the 26 states that still have no such provision.

Beyond the law, it’s important to change societal beliefs about rape, women who have been raped, and women who bear children conceived in rape. That means calling out toxic attitudes about “legitimate rape” and assumptions that women frequently lie about rape. It also means that we have to stop looking at the child conceived in rape as an extension of the rapist. Every child is a human being in his or her own right.