Kimberly Emerson

This week, like everyone else, I heard a Congressman say that in cases of “legitimate” rape, women don’t get pregnant.

This sentence is so many kinds of wrong, I am beside myself trying to figure out how to react.  Actually, I’m in between myself.  The me on one side wants to dismember the person who thought up the phrase “legitimate rape,” the me on the far side wants to chain the Congressman to a chair and show him the film Your Body and You required for all fifth grade girls, and the one in the middle hasn’t stopped screaming obscenities long enough to come up with a plan of action.

Rep. Todd Akin

The politician making these scientifically uncredited comments about rape and pregnancy is Congressman Todd Akin.  (I really hate mentioning him, because I don’t want to give him one more ounce of publicity, but I try hard to cite articles about current events, so that you all can read more than just my opinion about it.)  He’s running against Senator Claire McCaskill for a Senate seat in Missouri.  (Yes, he’s still running, despite calls from many Republicans for him to drop out of the race.)

According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), he’s wrong.  In a press release, the organization summed it up:

Each year in the US, 10,000–15,000 abortions occur among women whose pregnancies are a result of reported rape or incest. An unknown number of pregnancies resulting from rape are carried to term. There is absolutely no veracity to the claim that “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down.” A woman who is raped has no control over ovulation, fertilization, or implantation of a fertilized egg (i.e., pregnancy). To suggest otherwise contradicts basic biological truths.

– ACOG Statement on Rape and Pregnancy, issued August 20, 2012.

I trust a group of people who oversee pregnancies for a living more than I trust Rep. Akin, who (to my knowledge, and you can correct me if I’m wrong) never did cite any proof for his assertion.  If you don’t want to believe the ACOG, though, you can check this link from the U.S. National Library of Medicine, or this one from the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.  The numbers of actual pregnancies they cite as occurring each year vary, mostly because they seem to use data from different years, but the consensus is that 5% of all rapes of women in their child-bearing years result in pregnancy.  According to a website called sexinfo.com (NOT safe for work, but I’m guessing you figured that out already), the odds of the average act of unprotected sex resulting in pregnancy are just under 3%.   If either of these statistics are anywhere near correct, that means the odds of pregnancy from rape are actually higher than usual.  However, my research hasn’t turned up that assertion anywhere, and I’m guessing that the numbers can vary, so I’ll settle for believing that pregnancy occurs in rape at the same rate as consensual sex.

The thing that really scares me is that other people besides Rep. Akin believe this, too. His buddy, Rep. Steve King, (you’ll know him as Mr. “I’ve Never Heard of a Girl Getting Pregnant from Statutory Rape or Incest,”) stepped up to defend him in an interview with CBS affiliate KMEG, saying, “Well, I just haven’t heard of that being a circumstance that’s been brought to me in any personal way, and I’d be open to discussion about that subject matter.”  (Random thought: no one’s ever testified to me specifically that it’s painful to have a stake driven through your head, but somehow I’ve never questioned it.  Maybe it’s not.  I wonder if Rep. King is open to discussion about that, too.)  An article from Pema Levy of Talking Points Memo listed off three different politicians spouting the same line.  Pennsylvania State Representative Stephen Freind, North Carolina State Representative Henry Aldridge, and Arkansas State Representative Fay Boozman all made the same assertion at some point over the years.  (If you check out the link, make sure you have a bucket handy before you get to the part about Gov. Mike Huckabee appointing Rep. Boozman to the Arkansas Department of Health.)

I wish that what these people thought had some basis in truth.  I wish that the female body had some kind of special switch that got flipped when the sex was unwanted, so that fertilization could never result.  I wish pregnancy only happened when two people really love each other and are prepared to be parents.  Unfortunately, that’s not the way life works.  Bad things happen sometimes.  Science and the Bible are in complete accord here.  (Check out Matthew 5:45, where God “sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous,” or the entire book of Job.)

As it happens, all these politicians are men.  (Yes, even the one named Fay.)  Blaming their assertions on having a Y chromosome seems far-fetched; most men I know understand the idiocy of the idea that rapists can’t impregnate women.  Of course, most of the guys I encounter know the absurdity of phrases like “legitimate rape” – they realize that unwanted sex doesn’t have to leave marks in order to be rape.  They can open their minds to the idea that women might have been given a drug, or be at the mercy of someone in authority over them, or for a million other reasons feel that submitting to sex they don’t want is their best option for survival – and know that in all those cases, the act is still rape.

Maybe that’s the difference: the men in my life have more empathy than these politicians.  Maybe the men making these spurious claims can’t imagine what it’s like to be in a circumstance that they themselves will never encounter.  No problem, gentlemen.  Let me put it in terms you can understand:

Imagine yourself walking down the street.  A man pulls a gun on you, saying, “Your money or your life,” and sneezes right in your face.  Thinking how precious your life is, you pull out your wallet and hand over all your cash.  The man takes the cash and runs away.  You bravely proceed to the police station and say that you’ve been robbed, whereupon the officer looks you over and says, “I’m sorry, we have no proof that you didn’t just give him the money.” 

Two days later, you find that the burglar also gave you his cold.  Your wife wants to know how you got sick.  When you explain, she looks blankly at you and says, “You can’t get sick from someone who’s robbing you.  Everyone knows that.  The human body has ways to shut that whole thing down.”

I trust we’re all on the same page now.

Bad things happen.  The best we can do is to help make things better.  The second best thing we can do is not make them worse.  Rep. Akin and the others have done neither, and for some reason stand behind their decision.

In other news, Senator Claire McCaskill stands ten points ahead of Rep. Akin in the polls, according to the Atlantic Wire.  That represents a thirteen-point jump for her, compared to where she was before Rep. Akin made his infamous remarks.  Do you think maybe he’s a mole for the Dems?  It would be slimy, but at least it would make sense.

It’s a sad day for America when people who know less about the female body than your average kid entering middle school are making decisions for all of us with two X chromosomes.  Time to demand better, folks.

I scream, you scream, we all scream, and maybe eventually Rep. Akin will stop talking.

Kimberly really wishes that Congress would pay more attention to the economy than to her reproductive system, but she fears they are equally uninformed about both.

Tags: ACOG, burglary, Claire McCaskill, Congress, Fay Boozman, Henry Aldridge, incest, Mike Huckabee, RAINN, rape, sex education, Stephen Freind, Steve King, The Scream, Todd Akin