Good grief! Have you ever seen such a commotion as we’ve seen over Rep. Todd Akin’s comments about rape? Akin, who is seeking to unseat Sen. Claire McCaskill in Missouri, was asked if he supported abortion in the case of rape. When I first heard about the story all I heard was “legitimate rape.” I was puzzled by the term. What could he have meant by that?
The mainstream media knew what he meant by that but chose instead to demonize Akin over the remarks rather than have an adult conversation about their substance. Republicans, whether misinformed about the true content of the remarks or just spineless and wanting to distance themselves from the controversy, immediately condemned the remarks.
Terms like “outrageous” and “insensitive” flew, and that was just from the Republicans. The liberals were trying to hang this around the neck of the entire tea party movement. That’s like saying that all gays are responsible for the nut case who went into the Family Research Council with a backpack full of Chick-fil-A sandwiches and guns blazing.
It’s extremely difficult to have an intelligent discussion about Akin’s comments with all the hysteria swirling around them, so it’s instructive to look at what he actually said. When asked if he would support abortion in the case of rape he said the following: “It seems to me first of all from what I understand from doctors that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
The left immediately latched onto the “legitimate rape” portion of his remarks. They then twisted that into some far-fetched notion that Congressman Akin thinks there are times when a woman just needs to be raped. That is utter nonsense.
He’s making the point that a woman’s body, in time of trauma, will fight off the sperm of a rapist (more on that in a moment), thus if this is a legitimate rape her chances of getting pregnant are greatly reduced. Legitimate rape? As opposed to . . .? As opposed to someone who has consensual sex, wakes up mad at the guy in the morning and cries rape. It happens more often than you think. There are some high-profile instances of guys actually going to jail for rape only to find out later the woman was lying. So, when Akins said “legitimate rape” he was ruling out, for his example of low pregnancy rates, women who decided they were raped after the fact.
That’s totally different from the way the comments were portrayed and something Akins himself did a poor job in explaining after the fact.
Now, on to the second part of his statement, that a raped woman is far less likely to become pregnant. Statistics back the congressman up on this one. The normal pregnancy rate in people not trying to stop a pregnancy is about 40 percent. The pregnancy rate in rapes is around 5 percent. In other words, 95 percent of rape victims don’t get pregnant.
Akin went on to make the point that the rapist should be punished, not the innocent child he helped create. That’s a controversial point but if you truly believe that life begins at conception and that child is a living human being then why would you kill a child just because of who her daddy is? I’m not saying I could support forcing a woman to keep a rapist’s child. I’m just talking consistency.
What’s disappointing is many conservatives didn’t have the guts to talk about the facts and allowed hysteria to rule the day.
