Shauna Prewitt is an author, attorney, advocate, and public speaker. While a student at the University of Chicago, the course of Shauna's life changed forever. Finding herself the victim of sexual assault, Shauna soon thereafter learned that she was pregnant from her attack. After deciding to continue the pregnancy and raise her child, Shauna was shocked when her attacker sought custody of the baby girl. Trapped in her own personal hell, Shauna was even more astonished when she learned that few legal protections exist to protect the women who mother through rape. Without such laws, men who father through rape may assert the same custody rights over their rape-conceived children as other fathers enjoy.
Spurred by these events, Shauna made a commitment to do what she could to change the custody laws around the nation. In August 2006, Shauna enrolled at Georgetown Law School and began the tedious and often frustrating task of examining the custody rights of men who father through rape. Astonished to learn that only a handful of states had legal protections in place that restrict the parental rights of men who father through rape, Shauna set out to answer the question, "Why?" The results of Shauna's years-long analysis culminated in the publication of the first and only scholarly piece examining the legal protections afforded to women who mother through rape. Since its publication in March 2010, Shauna's piece has received much attention from legal scholars, state legislators, family court judges, attorneys, and advocacy groups.
Shauna R. Prewitt, Note, "Giving Birth to a Rapists Child: A Discussion and Analysis of the Limited Legal Protections Afforded to Women Who Become Mothers Through Rape," 98 Geo. L.J. 827 (2010), available at http://www.georgetownlawjournal.com/issues/pdf/98-3/Prewitt.PDF .
Abstract
Approximately 25,000 women become pregnant through rape each year. In response, many states have passed special laws, devised streamlined procedures, or both, to aid pregnant women who seek abortions or wish to place their rape-conceived children for adoption. However, few states have passed laws to aid the large numbers of raped women who choose to raise their rape-conceived children. Without such laws, in most states, a man who fathers through rape has the same custody and visitation privileges to that child as does any other father of a child. Moreover, as a result of this legal void, raped women and their children are left to face substantial and potentially terrible consequences. This Note argues that the absence of these laws stems from the societal images and other rhetoric concerning the pregnant raped woman that depict raped women as hating their unborn children and viewing their rape pregnancies as continuing their rape experience. These societal constructions have created a biased prototype of the pregnant raped woman and of the prototypical rape pregnancy experience by which all pregnant raped women are judged. Women who raise their rape-conceived children depart from the prototype and are, as a result, viewed with suspicion. Legal protections, such as alternate custody rights, are then denied to them because, being viewed as imposter rape victims, it is thought that there is nothing special about these women or their conceptions requiring any change in the manner in which custody and visitation determinations are made.
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