Now, unlike the skinny-dipping story, this Todd Akin mess is fair game (though that doesn’t necessarily justify days of feeding frenzy — or this nonsense — either). First of all, good grief. It’s a repugnant formulation as I think everyone can appreciate. Are we going to treat women who get pregnant as a result of rape as if they were somehow asking for it? That they were less than “legitimately” raped? There are tests and standards for judging whether a woman was raped; none of them have anything to do with whether she got pregnant.
I had not heard that people thought this about rape before. It certainly runs counter to everything I’ve read or heard about the subject, particularly about prehistoric and ancient societies where rape was a spoil of war.
Moreover, what relevance does it have to the question of abortion? Akin brings it up to somehow assure people that pregnancy-from-rape is (allegedly) rare. Okay let’s say it is. So what? How would it change the calculus differently if it were common? You still have to decide how society will deal with cases of pregnancy-from-rape. I just don’t get the point he was trying to make in the first place.
Also, who are these doctors telling him this?
Lastly, I want the GOP to win this Senate race as much as anyone. But Akin’s statement is the sort of idiotic and offensive self-inflicted wound that can’t be blamed on anybody but Akin himself.