A man whose wife faces the possibility of in vitro fertilization (IVF) or adoption (“Encourage adoption instead,” letter, July 7) and an adoptive father (“Don’t add to rape victim’s toll,” letter, July 7) both write in to chastise rape victims who choose to terminate pregnancies incurred by violent criminals. The first man, taking no issue with the Department of Defense funding his first preference of IVF, takes issue with the idea of DOD-funded abortion [in part] because the DOD does not also fund his second preference of adoption. The first man calls pregnancy-by-rape “inconvenient” and the adoptive father calls the victim’s legal right to choose abortion “selfish, shortsighted and narrow-minded.”

It’s telling just how personally these men take a rape victim’s decision even as they insist she not take the invasion of her body personally to the point of carrying a pregnancy to term, assuming the pregnancy would end in a live birth. The adoptive father is gung-ho for telling an adopted child the truth about his or her parentage, but neglects to say how truthful and pro-criminal-offspring he would be if his wife was raped and impregnated. It no doubt pacifies his more-truthful-than-thou attitude that he will never be raped and impregnated by a violent criminal.

The adoptive father further accuses the author of the July 5 letter “Child also suffers from rules” of an “unfortunate lack of reasoned moral clarity,” while in reality both July 7 letters writers suffer with it. Not once in the history of the world have there been more adoptive parents than children in need of homes, yet both men think a woman who is raped and impregnated with the offspring of a violent criminal should see a pregnancy through and put the child up for adoption for no other reason than to make them feel better.

Isn’t that “convenient”?

Diana Hartman

Böblingen, Germany

Migrated