This is a separate link round-up for the fiasco surrounding Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri who shot himself in the political foot last week with his total ignorance of basic human physiology. The regular weekly round-up is here.
Akin claimed female victims of “legitimate rape” don’t get pregnant because the female body has “ways to shut that whole thing down”. But don’t worry, Akin clarified what he meant by that…. he means that women lie about being raped, those evil vixen. Jezebel has a helpful guide to figure out whether or not your rape was legitimate.
Do I really need to address the veracity of whether women get pregnant from rape? The answer is yes, yes they do. The issue of “stranger sperm” affecting implantation is a real phenomenon, but that has nothing to do with the consensuality of any particular situation, nor is it meaningful or significant enough to matter at all. Though, some females are capable of shutting down pregnancies arising from rape….female ducks. So maybe Akin just got confused because he was having too much forcible sex with ducks?
Despite the obvious insanity and ignorance of Akin’s comments, now that notion (that “real rape” doesn’t cause pregnancy) is out there in the public…and that’s incredibly dangerous. Furthermore, what Akin believes is little different from what everyone else in the GOP thinks…that’s why the party platform includes cuts to women’s services, eliminating insurance for contraction–and possibly banning it altogether–as well as voting against equal pay.
In that last article, there was also this fascinating point: Sarah Palin talks at length about the agonizing personal choice of keeping her baby even though it had Down’s syndrome, a choice she would never have been able to think about, if her own policies came to pass. I guess that choice was so agonizing she decided to take it away from everyone else.
Romney thinks that life begins at conception, but has no problem with his son’s decision to destroy leftover human embryos from IVF that weren’t needed anymore…because his family’s human embryos aren’t like your human embryos, you see.
The GOP’s haste to denounce Akin didn’t stop them from once again establishing a “No Abortion, No Exceptions” (including rape, incest, threat to the life of the mother) platform. After all, their VP nominee Paul Ryan calls rape “just another method of conception”. But hey, he is also the one (along with Akin) who tried to redefine rape as only counting if it’s “forcible”. I’d sure likely to see what non-forced rape looks like.
Not everyone in the GOP was smart enough to just shut the hell up for once…Steve King has “never personally heard of a girl getting pregnant from statutory rape or incest“, which is why he doesn’t think Akin’s was that bad, really. There’s also the former president of the “National Right To Life” Committee, who thinks that fallopian tubes can close up enough to prevent sperm from swimming through,because devil vagina magic, and American Family Association spokesperson Bryan Fischer, who prefers delicate magical hormones that can tell the difference between welcome sperm and unwelcome sperm. Not to mention American Vision, a Christian group that accused the GOP of committing “political gang rape” against Todd Akin, that legalizing abortion has led to millions of women who will lie about being raped in a second in order to “kill for convenience”, and brb nuking this country from orbit.
Last I checked, Akin is still running for Senate, his opponent is barely leading him, and the GOP marches on in their quest to return to the 1870s. Sigh. As this Jezebel article says: I am all out of fucks to give.