No. Of course I wouldn’t. The comments on the Althouse post provide a good perspective on this. As a criminal defense attorney, it offends me to hear a former sex crimes investigator for the Indiana state police categorically imply that women don’t ever lie about rape. Why even have a trial then? What about the accuser of the Duke lacrosse team? What about the former Goshen College student charged with false informing just a couple weeks ago for inventing a rape out of thin air (according to the story at the link)? Furthermore, as I understand it the context of the exchange between Turner and Lawson was not whether a woman might lie about a rape in the context of a criminal investigation but whether a hypothetical woman might say she’d been raped so that the cost of her abortion could be covered by taxpayer-subsidized insurance. It’s not too difficult to imagine a woman doing that if she’s not necessarily going to have to point a finger at a particular perpetrator or to initiate a criminal investigation. I might suggest the danger of this could be mitigated by requiring the initiation of a criminal investigation before the cost of an abortion could be covered by taxpayer-subsidized insurance, but I think it’d be very bad public policy to create such an incentive for a woman to make a rape accusation leading to a criminal investigation which the woman wouldn’t make apart from the desire to have the cost of the abortion covered by insurance. If Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers are as public-spirited as they say they are, it seems they could set aside a separate designated privately-funded fund to provide abortions at no cost to women they believe have been raped. No need to get taxpayers involved.

Come to think of it, as attorneys we’re encouraged if not expected to do a certain amount of pro bono work in the public interest. Why shouldn’t a physician who performs abortions provide a free abortion to a woman whose pregnancy he believes was caused by rape? It’s not like rape accounts for more than a miniscule percentage of pregnancies that are aborted.