Rep Todd Akin:
"It seems to me first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that's really rare," Akin said. "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down," Akin said of a rape victim's chances of becoming pregnant.I don't need to ask if Akin's statement is other than ignorant garbage. I'd like to know the names of the doctors who spew the garbage. Actually, my question of the day is, as some of you may have already suspected, rhetorical.
Akin's excuse: "I meant forcible rape" (same distinction Paul Ryan believes).
ReplyDelete"Forcible rape" is a REDUNDANCY! >:-(
A redundancy, indeed, JCF. And Romney and Ryan are now on record as disapproving of Akin's statement.
DeleteNot a redundancy: There is also statutory rape, which needn't be "forcible".
ReplyDeleteAnd Romney/Ryan don't "disapprove" of Akin, they just "have an entirely different view" (view not specified). Akin, however, was only toeing the Republican party line on rape.
More interestingly, Akins may well have gotten his ideas from a bogus "research" paper from Phuysicians for Life.
It all hangs together.
When do the lies get to stop?
Statutory rape is sex with underage persons, right? Legitimate rape is not a legal term, is it?
DeleteIn medieval times, it was thought that the stress response would keep a woman from getting getting pregnant if she was raped, and I see from your link that the concept is still alive and being promoted today. So Akins is saying that any woman who gets pregnant was not legitimately raped. Facts mean nothing. Only the desired conclusion counts.
And the responses from Romney and Ryan are in carefully parsed words, and they don't say how their views differ from Akins.
There are cases where false charges of rape are made. I know one young man who claimed the sex was consensual, was convicted and then the conviction overturned, and the true facts are probably known only to him, the woman and God. And a man can be convicted of rape when force is not involved--not only statutory rape, but also having sex with a woman who is, to put it bluntly, too drunk or high to give actual consent. I think Akin merely meant to refer to rapes where it was fairly clear the woman did not consent.
ReplyDeleteBut Akin is maybe drawing on an old bit of folk medicine popular in the early 19th century (you can find it hinted at in Jane Austen's novels, for example)--the idea that conception will not occur unless the woman finds the sexual experience pleasant. And quite obviously if she's raped she won't find it pleasant.
So I think it's ignorant garbage, and of course Akin feels comfortable with it because it allows him to not feel sorry for woman who are raped, become pregnant, and if he had his way, forced to carry the baby to full term. That he grossly insulted 32,000 women a year (that's the figure I saw yesterday on Yahoo News) doesn't matter to him.
kishnevi, I don't believe Akin is talking about any of the situations you mention in your first paragraph. He's drawing on the medieval concept that I mentioned in my earlier comment that women don't get pregnant from rape due to the trauma response. I've seen the number of pregnancies as a result of rape here in the US range from 28,000 to 32,000.
DeleteFalse charges of rape are a different subject from the one Mimi has brought up here. Knowingly making a false charge of a felony is ITSELF a felony.
DeleteI, for one, don't buy any distinction between (so-called) "forcible rape" and statuatory rape.
If there's no consent (and minors CANNOT consent, by definition), there's force. With mind-altering substances, I'm sure there are gray areas (how drunk is too drunk?). But I think we can all agree that when someone is unconscious or incoherent, they are unable to give consent. Once again, sex w/ such a person is, by definition, RAPE.
Maybe I don't have to add, this conversation makes me extremely uncomfortable---as if there's a need for parsing, "when is rape 'rape'?"
CONSENT IS NECESSARY FOR CONSENSUAL SEX: why is this a difficult concept?
JCF, the distinction between "forcible rape" and statutory rape is a legal distinction under the law.
Delete"Legitimate rape" is not a legal term but contrariwise an oxymoron.
ReplyDeleteMinors can "consent" to sex, but that consent is not legally binding; "force" may well be absent.
Romney's position on abortion seems to be that he is opposed to it but would make exceptions for rape or incest (as contrasted with Ryan's, who would allow no such exceptions). The necessary implication from Romney's position, then, is that he is committed to legislating women's behavior.
Romney dances around so in the positions he takes on various issues that it's hard to know what is his present view on abortion, which is probably the way he likes it...vague.
DeleteIt's scary...it's like we're going back to the fifties where it was the woman's fault! Disgusting is the only word that fits this whole thing in politics. I'll vote, but I no longer want to follow the insanity.
ReplyDeleteCiss, it is scary. In the fifties, it was just part of living in the fifties, but for persons in positions of leadership to attempt to drag us back to the 1950s in the 21st century is bizarre and unsettling, indeed.
ReplyDeleteJust for the record: under the English common law, as Blackstone wrote in his definitive Commentaries on the Law of England (1765), "the crime of rape, raptus mulierum, [is] the carnal knowledge of a woman forcibly and against her will."
ReplyDeleteThe common law was considered to have existed from time immemorial, before there were Parliaments to make statutes. When Parliament did pass a law making it a felony to have sex with an underage girl, forcible or no, that was called "statutory rape," because the law considered that as a minor she had no legal capacity to consent (even if she was willing, say, with a boyfriend - I remember teenagers discussing this problem even in the early 1970's - it was no good crossing a state line to where the law was looser, because that made the boy liable for federal kidnapping charges!).
Interestingly, Blackstone goes on to say further about forcible rape: "This, by the Jewish law, was punished with death in case the damsel was betrothed to another man; and in case she was not betrothed, then a heavy fine of fifty shekels was to be paid to the damsel’s father, and she was to be the wife of the ravisher all the days of his life, without that power of divorce which was in general permitted by the Mosaic law."
See Deuteronomy 22:23-29. Which ought to scare the bejeezus out of all godfearing women, if they have any damn sense.