Found this legal citation posted over at Volokh.com interesting:
From 1820. So it is a bit of thinking that has survived quite a while without any popular support.
Exactly. And, frankly, all you need to do is look around to see that the whole rape =/= pregnancy thing is ridiculous. As some (black, if it matters) comedian said the other night, “If women can’t get pregnant from rape, why are there so many light skinned black people in Alabama?”
That’s a good one! 
It’s disappointing that anyone could fail to see from the context that Akin meant “actual” or “bona fide” rather than “justifiable”. It’s just like people who think Obama saying, “you didn’t build that” as meaning businesses rather than roads and bridges.
You can still fault Akin for minimizing the severity of other forms of rape as well as the absurd theory about pregnancy.
Didn’t Akin say that what he really meant was forcible rape? Whatever that means. The FBI UCR provides a definiton, but I have no idea if that’s what he means.
People who believe the world operates a certain way will re-interpret facts to match their world view. Even educated people, even doctors. Instead of doing the simple causation factors and understanding that anyone in this thread seems to do, they seem to conflate terms and conditions to produce a result in their mind that settles nicely does not upset the applecart of their view of how the universe should be unfolding. “Stress can prevent pregnancy? Well, rape is stress. Aha…”
Remember the stories of people who refuxed to believe what they saw through Galileo’s telescope, because the heavens were supposed to pure and perfect, not mountainous, cratered, or with unexplained small moons? Those guys were educated too. How about the guys who refused to believe so-and-so could be banging little boys in the university shower because “we know him well and he’s a good guy”?
Never underestimate the ability of the human mind, educated or otherwise, to engage in denial.
I have a related question: I’m not much of a Biblical scholar, but it seems to me the Old Testament had a couple of “rape babies” in it (via Ruth, Esther, Lot’s daughters, etc.). This is relevant because Willke’s fans and believers seem to come from the Evangelical community, and Biblical counter-evidence might hold water in an argument with them. So, Bible scholars: Any “rape babies” in the Bible that you can cite?
No matter how you slice it, he was still wrong. Because even when a woman is forcibly raped, she can still become aroused. That puts an end to his whole wack ass theory.
I understood legitimate rape to mean forcible, violent rape rather than statutory rape where the sex is considered rape not because it is accomplished through violence or threats, but because the victim, for some reason, is considered legally incapable of consenting. In some areas, 16 year old Suzie cannot legally consent to sex with her 18 year old boyfriend, but if they do end up going to bed, one can’t really expect Suzie to be emotionally traumatized by the experience to the level of forcible rape because from her perspective, she consented. She could end up regretting it in the morning, or a few months later, but that’s not quite the same thing.
That’s how I initially parsed it as well, but we were wrong. He clarified later that he meant “legitimate rape” as opposed to “women who lie about being raped so they can get an abortion.”
Obviously true.
But let’s take the medical claim (which is utterly false, of course) at face value: a consensual, loving, good-emotion filled sexual encounter causes a woman’s body to manufacture the soup of hormones necessary to create and sustain pregnancy; a violent, non-consensual, bad-emotion-filled sexual encounter fails to produce the magic hormones and pregnancy is either impossible or much less likely, depending on which version of the fairy tale you believe.
If this fantasy tale were true, surely you’d concede that there was a distinction to be made between encounters that were non-consensual only as a matter of law, such as a woman too young to consent legally, and encounters that were the result of force, threat, or intimidation.
“Legitimate” is not the right word to do so.
Lot’s daughters choose to have sex with him because they believed that they were the last people on earth and needed to repopulate the earth; that is, they saw themselves as Adam and Eve and Eve. They got there father drunk and had sex with him; if anyone was the rapist it was the two girls. Still no matter how you look at it it was an incestual relationship and not forced, legitimate or statutory rape.
[Moderator Note]
Let’s keep extraneous political commentary out of this thread. No warnings issued.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I’m not sure - this whole “legitimate rape” thing is a right-wing talking point, and another nutball, Scott Lively, explained it thus:
So you see, if a stranger jumps out of the bushes and forces himself on a woman, that’s “rape,” but if she’s on a date, that’s not rape.
Todd Akin’s from St. Louis, and was born in NYC. Not exactly a hillbilly.
And for the record, we in Mo. tell jokes like that about Arkansas, so–no, no, that’s not the way it goes.
He thought Nazi death camp doctors could perceive ovulation? At all? It’s pretty hard to see now!
He thought Nazi death camp doctors could perceive ovulation in an underfed population where hardly anyone had the fat reserves to ovulate?
Are Nazis magic in his mind?
Oddly enough, none come to mind. And I was raised in an evangelical church that fancied itself to be steeped in the Book. Maybe there’s something in one of the prophets; but the bits we read a lot seem to have been written by those with little interest in and little understanding of such things as ovulation, or of rape.
Ruth and Esther are sort of “woman seduces man” stories; I don’t remember getting pregnant as a feature of the initial seduction (though Boaz and Ruth eventually had a kid).
The story of Lot’s daughters and the story of Judah and Tamar, both from Genesis, are about women tricking men into sex and conceiving. Due to the hyper-condensed text of Genesis, it’s presented as if they each had sex with their target once and conceived. This might give the impression, to some people not well-read, that women can conceive at will.
Dinah wasn’t mentioned as conceiving after her rapine (that is, abduction).
Yeah, the closest that comes to mind is the Virgin Mary; her impregnation doesn’t seem to have been consented to so much as accepted.
So one of my questions in thinkig about this was “how can the CDC, the medical profession or the Republican Party even claim to know how many pregnancies or abortions resulted from rape?”
I have never known any medical professional to inquire about or see any significance of the circumstances of a child’s conception. Trying to quantify the number or percentage of pregancies resulting from rape would be sort of like trying to quantify the number or percentage of pregancies resulting from sex on the kitchen table. Despite the fact that I don’t know anyone that owns up to having or being a “kitchen table” baby, I’m sure they are out there and that there is nothing about sex on a kitchen table that magically prevents pregnancy.
So, when a woman goes to obtain a legal abortion, is she even asked if she was raped? If so, is there any expectation that the answer is honest?..I think in many cases, a NO answer in that situation may just mean "none of your freakin’ business. I guess I can see a situation where a woman that would never ever ever have an abortion for convenience might make it very clear to the medical professionals involved that she is only there because she was raped but I wouldn’t think such situations are common.
A lot of rape victims are married or in committed relationships. If one of these women is impregnated during a rape and decides to keep the child, how many people aside from this woman and her husband would ever know the circumstances of the child’s conception? Probably not many.
I don’t want to even argue the medical because it might give credence to something totally ridiculous…like others have pointed out, most of the delicate hormonal stuff ( which isn’t that damn delicate ) like ovulation would’ve already taken place at the time of the rape. And I have friends in nursing that can vouch for the fact that women can be so seriously physically injutred and traumatized that they can’t breathe or swallow, yet their hormones still kick things off every 28 days.
Lot offered his daughters to the men of Sodom so they wouldn’t have sex with each other. Not particularly sensible to modern readers, but the bit with them and Lot in the cave was really the least of it.
Okay, for everyone who thinks this just totally nuts, read up on theories about female organism.
It has been posited that lubrication and spasms evolved to assist the sperm on their journey to the egg. Therefore, one could argue, if the woman is not aroused, and does not orgasm, the mechanisms that evolved to promote fertilization are not triggered.
Am I defending this theory? No. Have I read weirder theories? Hell, yes.
Do I believe it is impossible for an assault rape (as opposed to an incapable-of-consent rape) to result in pregnancy? No. But I wonder if they do result in pregnancy less frequently …
I don’t know; I don’t care; no child should be brought into this world reluctantly.
I think there’s a little more to it. “Culture wars” types point to the late 70s/early 80s as a time when commonly-held notions about what is and isn’t rape were suddenly dashed by leftists and feminists. “Marital rape” was not, to their recollection, a serious concept until John and Greta Rideout got it into the law books. “Date rape” was kind of a grey area, and feminist scholars like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin seemingly tried to get every interaction involving a penis redefined as rape.
My hunch, and I have no cite, is that “legitimate rape” excludes all of the stuff this particular era dragged in, or is thought to have dragged in.
A. Women sometimes orgasm during rape. Yes, even “legitimate rape”. Yes, even if her face is getting bashed in with a hammer while she’s being raped.
B. Just because something *promotes *conception does not mean it’s *required *for conception. See also: tequila.