When you Google “Battle of the Sexes” the first thing that comes up is references to the 1973 Billie Jean King–Bobby Riggs exhibition tennis match which was held at the Houston Astrodome. Televised internationally, the match was viewed by roughly fifty million people in the United States and ninety million worldwide.

It was a media spectacle and a spectacle in itself as much as an athletic event; King made a Cleopatra-style entrance on a gold litter carried by men, while Riggs arrived in a rickshaw pulled by female models. Emotions between the genders ran high, both sides “throwing down the gauntlet” for their own reasons—for females it was a bold challenge; for males it was an ultimatum. The hype was such that you would think the very future of feminism and the very survival of a patriarchal natural order was at stake.

King won in straight-sets. Women celebrated wildly, and men suddenly found the competitors’ age difference a significant factor (Riggs was fifty-five; King was twenty-nine). But enough of that.

A “Battle of the Sexes” environment is ever present in society to one degree or another, whether mildly percolating as expressed in sayings like “can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em,” or at a furious boil such as when the pro-life movement is reduced to hyperbolic theatrics as found in Handmaiden’s Tale dystopian fiction, with men framed as quasi-religious authoritarian ogres turning women into brood mares gussied up like weird red nuns (a truly unfortunate fashion decision none-the-less embraced and strutted on pro-abortion runways while holding “blood” stained dolls in front of their private parts). But enough of that.

What this essay is really about is what I perceive as the somewhat mildly percolating but ever on the verge of a furious boil “battle of the sexes” element within the pro-life community, and it centers on rape. I dealt with this subject matter in an article I penned last year, “Rape is a Pro-life Issue,” and I feel called to expand on it.

In that essay, I wrote: “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.”

In other words, the sanctity of life has more than one angle. The biology angle is that life begins at conception, which of course it does. (If not then, when? An arbitrary and capricious man-made time-line?). And because a life begins at conception, the child’s humanity governs from the beginning, no matter the circumstances of his or her origin. Whether produced in a petri dish or from an act of rape, the result is still a child of God who deserves protection.

Got it. All pro-life women do, even though in the case of rape, the burden of living this truth is borne by women alone. Meanwhile, men seem to have the luxury of being armchair philosophers. From this position of comfort, it’s all too easy for them to believe they’re being gallant by, after providing a cursory acknowledgement of her trauma, to remind us all that it’s still life—no matter what! He’s a beast! Even a monster! But hey gals, ultimately the only thing that really matters here is that this sperm met her egg and made life. Like it or not.

This can sting for some pro-life women, because, isn’t this attitude another way of playing God? That it suggests the rapist’s contribution to making new life, his sperm, is somehow justified once it does, and so cancels out his criminally uncivilized act? And can’t it foster ambivalence toward men from women in the pro-life community, and deep resentment and suspicion from women at large? Hello crazy red nuns.

Perhaps one of the most breathtakingly thoughtless examples of a professed pro-life guy “not getting it” came to us courtesy of the late Todd Akin, who died in 2021. The Republican U.S. Congressman, who served from 2001 to 2013, said during a 2012 television interview: “if it’s a legitimate rape the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” First off, it sounds like he’s talking about the boiler in his basement, not a flesh and blood human being, and to say “legitimate rape” implies there’s the illegitimate kind. So, if it’s a “real” rape she won’t get pregnant (an old wives’ tale, ironically enough), and if she doesn’t get pregnant, raping matters less?

Unfortunately, the downplaying of rape isn’t just anecdotal evidence of one conservative congressman’s gaff. There is evidence that many people with pro-life and conservative values fall short in appreciating the gravity of rape. According to a 2023 study surveying participants about described rape scenarios with varying levels of alcohol involved, those who scored higher on a scale of Conservative views and Rape Myth Acceptance, “attributed less responsibility to the perpetrator and more responsibility to the victim across all conditions.” Further, a 2025 study investigating trends in perceptions of rape found “statistically significant and substantively meaningful gender and partisan gaps in the acceptance of rape myths,” with men on both sides of the political spectrum showing “statistically similar predicted level of acceptance across all rape myth statements.”

Again, the humanity governs from the beginning, whether it begins with sperm and egg in a petri dish or from a rapist’s sperm and his victim’s egg, he or she is still a child of God who deserves protection, and it’s noble to insist on it. But in their insistence, do some prolifers, perhaps unconsciously, elevate a man’s sperm to dominate the narrative and damage the pro-life cause, alienating more women?

Before You Speak of Life, Speak of Justice

What to do? I humbly offer the following mental exercises.

Firstly, in Philippians 2:6–7, St. Paul emphasizes that: “Jesus, though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to.” OMG! What did I just imply! It is NOT, I repeat not to suggest men are like God. Suffice to say the male ego tends to be healthy enough. What I’m alluding to is that fellows might reflect on how if Jesus, who actually was (is) God had the humility to not brag about it, then perhaps they could bear that in mind when expounding on rape, (some might say “man-splaining”) and not fixate on the acceptability of sperm simply because of its biological standing, and in the process come off sounding like they’re exonerating a despicable act.

Secondly, when advocating for pro-life causes, “Don’t Scare the Horses.” This is an old saying that evolved over time, from Victor Hugo saying he didn’t care what congress did as long as they didn’t scare the horses, to society mavens remarking on bad behavior in public. Another example of its usage, and fitting for my purposes here, is an 1897 article in The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Washington about members of the Salvation Army taken to police headquarters for violating an ordinance by playing instruments—tubas, trombones and tambourines!—while marching in a busy part of the city. The paper reprinted the pertinent law, which was: “The ordinance says no person shall do anything upon the streets or sidewalks which shall have a tendency to frighten horses.” The gist of it is, in a time when horses were the main form of street transportation, spooking them could have unfortunate repercussions. Be mindful of nature. So in the interests of fostering a better understanding between men and women on the enormously sensitive subject of rape, I might suggest here, “Don’t Scare the Horses.” And don’t carelessly piss off the ladies.

But there’s something else. It takes a lot of guts and immeasurable charity for a woman to be able to get past her own pain and disgust and agree to carry a rapist’s child. What she needs is support, not pity. What better way for pro-life men to support women than to unequivocally do gallant battle against the rape culture that percolates through society, be it tawdry jokes, blaming women, or pornography. Be a hero, please, not a scold.