32 MOTHER JONES |^ SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019
PLAN Cclear and convincing evidence standard
in rape custody cases.
Proponents of terminating rapists’
parental rights say requiring a convic-
tion makes no sense, since rapes are un-
derreported and fewer than 1 percent of
rape cases result in a felony conviction.
Rapists sometimes use the threat of pa-
rental rights to coerce women to drop
charges or requests for child support.
“It’s important to consider the impact
co-parenting has on a mother who is
thus confronted again and again with
the trauma of rape,” says Shauna Prewitt,
a lawyer who was allegedly raped in her
final year of college, gave birth to a daugh-
ter, and went head-to-head with the
father in court. “Depression, not able
to work, extreme fear, anxiety, post-
traumatic stress disorder.”
That struggle is familiar to Jessica
Stallings. At 32, she’s only recently started
to talk publicly about the abuse that poi-
soned her childhood. When she was 12,
her mother’s 19-year-old half brother
moved in with her family in Alabama.
He raped her repeatedly, Jessica says, and
she got pregnant and had a miscarriage
within a few years. To this day, Jessica
wonders why her doctor didn’t inform
authorities as required by state law. “At
the time I was just scared,” Jessica says.
“But now I’m thinking, ‘Why was some-
thing more not done?’”
A family member pressured Jessica
to marry her uncle. She got pregnant
again at 15, 17, and 18. Her surviving
sons are now 16 and 13 years old. Her
second child, who would be 14 now, was
severely disabled due to Krabbe disease,
a nervous system disorder. He lived only
two years. Jessica has his nickname,
Pooh, tattooed on her right wrist.
Her uncle continued to abuse her,
and after a particularly frightening
attack, she finally fled. “I’ve got to get
out of here or he’s going to kill me,” she
remembers thinking. In 2009, while the
divorce was pending, a judge granted
her a protection order. Without family
support, Jessica became homeless. The
courts gave the father full custody.
She eventually married again, found
a job as a radio marketer, and had two
more children. In 2012, she regained
custody of her two oldest sons. After
their father tried to exercise his visita-tion rights in 2015, she decided to seek
criminal charges against him. She finds
it hard to understand why a grand jury
declined to press charges.
Meanwhile, she kept fighting for full
custody. Jessica sent the family court
judge 30 handwritten pages detailing
the incest and abuse she had experienced.
The courts ruled the evidence inadmissi-
ble and said that Jessica had to let her sons
see their father twice a week. “I have to
pay for this monster to see my children,”
she says. “But I don’t want this monster
to live in the same galaxy.”
In 2017, Jessica was scrolling through
Facebook, saw an article about Kiessling’s
work, and joined an online support
group for women who became pregnant
through rape. Kiessling, who herselfwas conceived in rape, started the group
eight years ago through her organiza-
tion Save the 1, which advocates that “all
pre-born children should be protected
by law and accepted by society, without
exception and without compromise.”
The groups connect women like Jessica
and Tiffany, who share Kiessling’s belief
that abortion is immoral. In total, the
groups have about 600 members.
Kiessling found Jessica a family lawyer
in Alabama, Tanya Hallford, who took
on her custody case pro bono. At the
end of 2017, she again sought criminal
charges, but Jessica says she has since
heard nothing. “The first time I went
to the grand jury, they told me there
wasn’t enough evidence,” Jessica says,
“but the second time I went, I had all
these mounds of evidence. It looks black
and white to me.”
Even charges of first-degree sexual
assault do not always untangle survi-vors from their rapists. In 2011, 18-year-
old Noemi Martinez became pregnant
after she was raped by a co-worker.
Though her attacker admitted they’d
had intercourse, a prosecutor and a
judge let him plead down to third-
degree sexual assault.
“Prosecutors are so used to getting
cases off their docket because they are
so overwhelmed. They’re just so used to
giving plea deals and getting rid of the
cases as fast as they can,” says Kiessling.
While she was pregnant, Noemi got a re-
straining order against her rapist, who
had been harassing her. “He was telling
me to beat myself in the stomach. He was
telling me to fall down a flight of stairs
and text him when it was dead,” she
recalls. But when she applied for Medic-
aid, the state contacted the perpetrator.
He demanded visitation rights—and a
court granted them. Every other week,
Noemi has to leave her daughter, now 7,
with him for an entire weekend.
In the following years, Nebraska law-
makers tried to change the state’s rape
custody law, and Noemi supported their
efforts. “Personally having to have contact
with this person after what happened was
terrifying, but now having to share my
daughter with no supervision is worse,”
she wrote in a statement to the state
legislature’s Judiciary Committee in 2017.
“I was told that it is in the best interest of
my child to have a father in her life. And
what makes this rapist safe to be a father?”
That year, Nebraska changed its law
so that anyone convicted of sexual as-
sault can be barred from claiming pa-
rental rights over their victim’s child. But
the new law doesn’t apply retroactively;
since her assailant took his plea deal in
2011, it won’t help Noemi.this may, as Kiessling was in touch with
Jessica about her ongoing custody ordeal,
Alabama’s governor signed a sweep-
ing abortion ban in the hopes that the
Supreme Court would step in to the
inevitable battle and overturn Roe v.
Wade. Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi,
Kentucky, and Ohio have also passed laws
this year banning abortion after 10 weeks
of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape.
(None of the laws have taken effect.)
Previously, most abortion restrictions
included rape and incest exceptions toAn estimated10,000
women who get
pregnant through
rape annually
choose to raise
the baby.