Here's the kerfuffleless (yet significant) post that started the kerfuffle...

[TreasonousBastard]

I was asked to repost it and hope it now gets more positive reviews than the first version. I just realized there is a "Women's rights and issues" group and it probably has a place there, too.

(the full interview is 42 minutes long and includes much more than the excerpts at the site-- worth a listen)

http://www.npr.org/2012/11/12/164958401/parenting-a-child-whos-fallen-far-from-the-tree

"When Andrew Solomon started his family with his husband, John Habich, he says, people were surprised that he wasn't afraid to have children, given the topic of the book he was writing. That book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, explores what it's like for parents of children who are profoundly different or likely to be stigmatized — children with Down syndrome, deafness, autism, dwarfism, or who are prodigies, become criminals, or are conceived in rape."

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Interview Highlights:

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"On what it's like for mothers who have children conceived in rape

"All of the women were concerned about the ways in which their child might resemble the rapist psychologically. If the biological father of this child was capable of something so awful, is this child going to turn out to be capable of awful things? So that was one fear. And then next to it — and not entirely separable from it but also not entirely the same thing — the child was a constant reminder of the rape. As one of the women said to me, 'I have a friend who was raped and a few years later she was really able to get into a useful denial and say it never happened. I will never be able to say it never happened. I will always have that pair of eyes looking at me, that are evidence that yes, it did happen.' "

On what it's like for children to learn they were conceived in rape

"There's a central problem always for a woman who decides to keep a child conceived in rape, which is at what point do I actually tell my child where the child came from? So people who adopt children are usually now advised to tell the children from the very beginning of childhood, 'You are adopted, but you were adopted because we so much wanted a child and we are so lucky to have you,' and it's a part of their narrative. But rape is too disturbing and violent and the sexuality involved — it is too complicated to explain to a 2-year-old. ...

"I've met children who have been conceived in rape and who said that actually finding out had been a great relief — that it explained to them why their mother had had a child under odd or unusual circumstances. It explained why they sensed some ambivalence in a mother whom they had tried to please. ... But there were others who were so horrified by that news and felt so polluted by it that they acted out in various very destructive ways. ... They felt that other people would think, 'This person is a child of rape; this person is like a rapist; this person is untrustworthy; this person comes from dirt and darkness.' "
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