Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

by Andrew Solomon

Children conceived in rape, however, acquire their horizontal identity by way of their mother’s trauma;

Her identity as a mother proceeds directly from her identity as a rape victim.

Her child embodies the violence done against her and gives manifest permanence to what she may ache to forget.

women who bore children conceived in rape were permitted to let them die of exposure.

woman in the American colonies could not make a claim of rape; her husband, her father, or, if she was a servant, her employer needed to present the cause to a magistrate.

In Puritan Massachusetts, a woman pregnant through rape was prosecuted for fornication.

Rape of black women in the United States was not acknowledged as rape; you could not violate your own property, and children conceived through such rapes were themselves slaves.

that she had resisted, usually by showing evidence of bodily harm, and to somehow “prove” that the man had ejaculated inside her.

One impregnated rape victim of the 1950s said, “If a certain male wanted to get out of being named the true father, he would get about five of his buddies to swear they had sex with the girl.

Branded promiscuous, the female had little recourse against the fellow, and she already experienced shame galore for birthing a child out of marriage.”

rape was an act of violence and aggression, not sexuality.

broadening it to include nonconsensual sex within relationships and marriages, extending it to include involuntary sexual contact other than penetrative penile-vaginal intercourse, removing the burden of proving that the encounter had been caused by irresistible force, and eliminating gender-specificity.

Rape violates the intimate, private self as well as the outer, social one. It is neither purely sexual nor purely violent; it is the humiliating expression of a power differential that aggressively unites these two

motives and behaviors.

Our warnings to our daughters caution them against getting into a car with a stranger or going home with a man they meet in a bar, but 80 percent of rapes are committed by someone the victim knows.

Impoverished women who depend on men for survival feel less volition over their own bodies.

Marina James

“But they kept wanting me to talk about the rape,” she said. “Everybody wants a play-by-play. I don’t want to keep reliving a half hour of my life: I have all this other life that I would rather live.”

Many women keep children conceived in rape because they have no access to abortion, because of religious beliefs, or because of a controlling partner, husband, or parent. I also met women who completed their pregnancies because deep self-examination led them to that decision.

Some women experience attachment and revulsion in rapid alternation. In other instances, an initial hatred can give way to love—sometimes when the movement of the fetus is first felt, sometimes not until the child has matured into an adult. Women who have grown to love such children are often outspoken critics of abortion.

Brenda Henriques

American abortion law from the colonial period through the mid-nineteenth century was predicated on the English common-law principle that life begins with quickening—the moment when the expectant woman feels the fetus moving inside her, usually at four to five months.

He proposed a law, never implemented but highly influential, that would permit abortions for rape victims, mentally retarded women, girls under sixteen, and any “poorly nourished woman with a large family whose external conditions make the pregnancy and the subsequent care of the child a serious burden.”

In 1939, the first US Hospital Abortion Committee was formed to determine case-by-case eligibility, and by the 1950s, such committees were ubiquitous. They approved only “therapeutic” abortions: those intended to preserve the mother’s health or to avoid the birth of a child with significant disabilities.

1959, the American Law Institute (ALI) proposed legalizing abortion if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest, the fetus had severe abnormalities, or the mother’s health was at risk.

unwed women who had been raped was to send them to maternity homes, where they were encouraged to surrender their children for adoption.

Women who wanted to abort were considered murderous; women who wanted to keep their children, selfish.

The antiabortion movement argues that an unborn child is innocent even in cases of rape.

The mother of a rape-conceived child said, “My child is not the exception that can be tossed away. There would be no one who could look her in the eyes and believe that she doesn’t deserve life due to the choice of a man we never even knew.”

“Conceived in Rape: A Story of Hope” includes the assertion, “I am not a product of rape, but a child of God.” A blogger wrote in sarcastic response, “Rape isn’t abuse! It is another form of the immaculate conception!”

One rape survivor, in testimony before the Louisiana Senate Committee on Health and Welfare, likened her son to “a living, breathing torture mechanism that replayed in my mind over and over the rape.” Another described mothering a rape-conceived son as “entrapment beyond description” and felt that “the child was cursed from birth”; her son manifested severe psychological challenges and was ultimately removed from the family by social services.

Melinda Stephenson knew from childhood that she wanted to go into deaf education.

Rapists are often repeat offenders; it is less well-known that women who have been raped before age eighteen are twice as likely as other women to be raped as adults.

Lori Michaels

Mothers who were unable to protect themselves are gratified by their ability to protect their children, and shielding them from such awful knowledge is part of that safeguarding.

Lisa Boynton

Prejudice against rape victims and their children is as real as it is irrational.

Tina Gordon

A woman who keeps a child conceived in rape has a permanent tie to her rapist.

Just as abused children cling to their abusive parents, driven by a biology beyond logic, so these women remain in thrall to their attackers, unable to break free of the terrible intensity of their connection.

The grimmest challenge for many of these

women comes if the rapist or his family tries to gain access to the child.

However, as in the case of rape victims in general, the burden of proof that a rape took place is often placed upon the woman who has suffered the crime. Often it comes down to a ‘he said/she said’ issue.”

Emily Barrett

In the late eighties and early nineties, the marital exception to rape laws was gradually removed from the books in most states, despite spirited protests from the political Right, including some who claimed, echoing the misogyny of the colonial era, that accusations of rape within marriage would be used by vengeful wives to persecute innocent husbands.

Ashley Green

I’m going to lose custody of her. I think this is the time to talk about statutory rape and how damaging it is: the injustice of having a child with an adult more than twice my age.

Statutory rape is a category that has often been abused. Someone I interviewed was arrested when he was found having sex with his girlfriend, who was six months younger than he, an underage seventeen to his legally adult eighteen, even though his girlfriend’s parents approved of the relationship.

no one over the age of eighteen should ever be allowed to have carnal relations with anyone under the age of eighteen can be hard to defend in such circumstances.

some women repeatedly put themselves in situations of extreme vulnerability.