Rape is the third rail in both the pro-life and pro-choice camps, but for different reasons. For prolifers life begins at conception, and since this includes embryos created during IVF procedures, certainly a child conceived by rape has the same right to life. But defending that right puts one on a collision course with extraordinarily sensitive matters, matters that go so deep more may be called for than showing compassion for the victim’s plight and admiration when she agrees to have the baby.

The woman who has been reduced to being a bystander in her own life needs others to really put themselves in her in shoes, nigh impossible when pregnancy is viewed by a man for whom pregnancy is impossible. Even a woman who hasn’t been pregnant feels in her bones the power of its possibility. Can men ever truly relate to this possibility of the “other” growing inside of them? Or understand how pregnancy is a visceral experience—wonderful if welcome but detested if not?

There are times in life when one finds another person physically repulsive because something about their personality makes your skin crawl. What happens to your nervous system when they touch you? Now imagine that person’s issue growing inside of you. Even worse, imagine a vile stranger commandeering your body and a part of him growing in you. What it takes to overcome that abhorrence shouldn’t be taken for granted by anyone, including women firmly grounded in pro-life sensibilities. It takes real work to see things from the victim’s point of view in this most intimate context. What it’s like to feel what she’s feeling while trying to reconcile it with life beginning at conception; to wrestle with it as a reality rather than resting in the comfort of a noble belief.

And while it’s true enough that a pregnancy is a pregnancy is a pregnancy no matter how it happens, sanctity of life demands that there’s no such thing as “just a pregnancy.” It’s always profound. The moral objection to IVF is that it replaces a human act of love with technology and makes the child a product, that it’s playing God. The rapist is playing God with the woman’s body. Bad enough he robs her of her most basic self-possession, but the attack has the potential of creating life itself, and something so profound in the hands of a brute scoffs at sanctity. Rape is a pro-life issue.

Some women can find their way to accepting it as just a pregnancy (if he didn’t break her teeth off and burn her with cigarettes), despite its traumatic onset. They have a strong sense of self. One that says: No matter how this happened, this baby is my family. She’s not acting out of self-sacrifice, she couldn’t care less if anyone admires her, she just possesses a level of autonomy the “prostitution is empowerment” crowd can only dream of. She confronts the pro-choice third rail and turns it into their nightmare.

Even though almost all anti-abortion legislation since Roe has exceptions for rape, when Roe was overturned the battle cry “Not Even for Rape” was shouted from the ramparts second only to “Women Won’t be Treated for Ectopic Pregnancy.” The latter can be countered with education, but the former has a more insidious hold. The subject of rape can consume women’s emotions and create fertile ground for Handmaiden’s Tale dystopia. It’s the ultimate “It’s a Man’s World and they can do whatever they want and get away with it” chagrin, the gut-punch feeling that men hold all the cards.

The pro-choice camp wastes no time exploiting this emotional minefield. Or should I say mind-field? If it’s wrong, wrong, wrong for a woman to be “forced” to give birth even though she had sex willingly, what can be made of a scenario where a woman is asked to rise to the occasion and take pity on a baby conceived in rape, who is as much an innocent bystander as she is? Any woman who would allow herself to be cajoled into it by “she has the heart of a saint” platitudes, the pro-choicer howls, is a fool! But the woman who sees the child as hers no matter what the circumstances is the most dangerous of foes because it’s impossible to belittle her with mockery.

Rape is a third rail issue because it is so fraught with emotion for anyone who nears it. Daring to go there, for the right reasons, contributes to an important discussion underway in the pro-life movement, and hopefully promotes effective cultural change concerning this age-old problem, which ultimately is more powerful than law. Pro-choice groups exploiting it, on the other hand, can never change anything.