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GOP congressman and Senate nominee Todd Akin: Rape is an effective form of birth control

Not a doctor, but plays one on TV.

Our completely incorrect biology lesson today comes not from Chateau Heartiste or The Spearhead or EvoPsychBullshitBeliever997 on Reddit but from an actual elected official with influence in the real world:  Republican Congressman Todd Akin of Missouri, currently his party’s nominee for Senate.

In a recent interview with KTVI-TV, the Fox affiliate in St. Louis, he explained that the ladies just don’t get pregnant from rape — well, “legitimate rape” anyway. As he put it:

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.

But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.

As The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake notes, this whole “rape as birth control” thing is not actually, you know, true:

Akin’s claim is one that pops up occasionally in social conservative circles. A federal judge nominated by President Bush in the early 2000s had said similar things, as have state lawmakers in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. …

According to a 1996 study, approximately 32,000 pregnancies result from rape annually in the United States, and about 5 percent of rape victims are impregnated.

Talking Points Memo notes that this isn’t the first time Akin has suggested that

some types of rape are more worthy of protections than others. As a state legislator, Akin voted in 1991 for an anti-marital-rape law, but only after questioning whether it might be misused “in a real messy divorce as a tool and a legal weapon to beat up on the husband,” according to … the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Akin: making up shit to deny rape victims their rights since 1991!

Currently, Akin has a big lead in the polls over his Democratic rival, sitting Sen. Claire McCaskill.

Here’s the relevant portion of Akin’s interview; you can find the whole thing at the Talking Points Memo link above.

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Snowy
Snowy
12 years ago

Eww

katz
12 years ago

FiveThirtyEight predicts a 10+ point drop for Akin because of his comments 😀

(NYT, so it’ll use up one of your free articles for the month)

amandajane5
12 years ago

Just had to add in a story re: door-to-door canvassing. A couple of years back I got a knock on the door by someone canvassing, wanting to know if she could put up a sign for a specific candidate in my front yard. I’m a registered Democrat, and lived on a pretty heavily traveled street at the time. When I said that yes, I’d probably end up voting for the guy in question, but I didn’t really consider myself a supporter because of his stance on abortion. She then brightly told me, “Yes! He’s pro-life!” “Yes, I answered, that’s the problem.”

Kudos to y’all doing the hard work, I hope it’ll end up being successful!

drst
drst
12 years ago

katz – here’s hoping.

indifferentsky
12 years ago

@ Moose

wow, et tu Helen Freaking Mirren? Didn’t see that one coming. Wow.
I mean wow. What a stab. Ouch.

sunshinemary
12 years ago

Congressman Akin voted for the anti-marital “rape” law. I would assume that most of you favor such laws, although in my opinion the idea of marital “rape” is ludicrous, so why do you have such a big issue with him? Is it because he is not pro-abortion?

Snowy
Snowy
12 years ago

Oh look, sunshinepassiveaggressive is back. Goody!

ithiliana
12 years ago

MaryTroll: Read the OP more carefully: it includes this quote:

some types of rape are more worthy of protections than others. As a state legislator, Akin voted in 1991 for an anti-marital-rape law, but only after questioning whether it might be misused “in a real messy divorce as a tool and a legal weapon to beat up on the husband,” according to … the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

We know he voted for it, but did the same kind of messy doubting that you pulled with the use of quotations in rape.

Your opinion is hateful shit: a woman has the right to say NO to sex with anybody, married to him or not.

He is spouting junk science (i.e. what he said is FUCKING FAKE AND FAKING FUCKED UP), he wants to deny women CHOICE of health care and medical decisions that are their right to make: he is ANTI CHOICE.

And I’m sure you are as well, Ms. Sunny Troll.

sunshinemary
12 years ago

I read the Helen Mirren article. She is entirely correct on this issue. Apparently women no longer believe they need to have any common sense whatsoever; in fact, it often seems like they don’t even have to actually say no because the onus is on the man to obtain explicit consent at every step. That is incredibly silly. How does a man even know when he has obtained consent? What if she says yes and then later claims she said no? You do realize that any of you who are men could have such a thing happen to you, right? Just because you think of yourselves as feminists will not protect you from out-of-control “rape” laws.

cloudiah
12 years ago

Ah, so once a woman marries a man her body belongs to him. Ergo, rape — that’s unpossible!

See item #7:

cloudiah
12 years ago

Consent: it’s SO difficult to discern. It’s better to just let men make that judgment call, because women are flighty and don’t know our own minds, you know.

hellkell
hellkell
12 years ago

Do fuck off, Sunshine.

Snowy
Snowy
12 years ago

You do realize that any of you who are men could have such a thing happen to you, right?

Actually no, I don’t think that will happen because I don’t go around raping people. It’s not actually that hard to avoid. You must have a very poor opinion of men that you think we all go around doing this.

sunshinemary
12 years ago

@cloudiah
In fact, each spouse’s body belongs to the other in a Christian marriage per 1 Corinthians 7:4-5

The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife.Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer.

Neither spouse has the right to refuse sexual relations unless the other agrees to abstain, too. For Christians, there can be no such thing as marital rape.

I guess non-Christians can handle their relations however they want, but it makes no sense to have a marriage in which the partners cannot reasonably expect sexual expression to occur. That reduces them from husband and wife to room-mates.

Noadi
12 years ago

I have to wonder about the people someone like sunshinemary surrounds themselves with that they think people routinely have people charged with crimes they didn’t commit. I mean, do you never ask to borrow anything out of fear that you’ll be charged with theft?

CassandraSays
CassandraSays
12 years ago

Oh, Smugly Disingenuous is back. Look, Mary, if you want to declare your body to be the property of your husband that he can do with as he wishes, that’s your call, but that doesn’t mean that other women are obliged to make the same decision.

ithiliana
12 years ago

And, yeah, putting rape in quotation marks is right up there with other signals of assholery in language.

sunshinemary
12 years ago

@ Snowy,
But you cannot prove that you did not rape her if she says you did. In prior times, reasonable people would look at the whole situation to determine whether how likely it was that consent was obtained. Now the standard is “if she says it was rape, then it was rape.”

Dracula
Dracula
12 years ago

What if she says yes and then later claims she said no?

The possibility that someone might lie about a crime happening is a pretty fucking stupid reason to make said crime legal.

cloudiah
12 years ago

@PassiveAggressiveSunshine, And exactly why do you think you get to impose your brand of christianity on people who don’t practice it?

Noadi
12 years ago

sunshinemary: It’s okay to expect to have a sexual relationship with your spouse, but that’s different than thinking it’s okay to force your spouse to have sex when they don’t want to. Do you think that forcing your spouse to do things against their will is a healthy relationship? Something a loving spouse would do? In my opinion treating your spouse with that level of disrespect and disregard for their wishes and emotional health is not what a good spouse does, it’s something an abusive asshole who has no business being married does.

Snowy
Snowy
12 years ago

@ Snowy,
But you cannot prove that you did not rape her if she says you did. In prior times, reasonable people would look at the whole situation to determine whether how likely it was that consent was obtained. Now the standard is “if she says it was rape, then it was rape.”

Yeah no, this is not actually true. Maybe that’s how it works in imaginationland but not here. I am not worried. But thanks for sharing, acid trips are fun!

drst
drst
12 years ago

Now the standard is “if she says it was rape, then it was rape.”

Jesus wept, if only that were really true.