Although, really, a quick thought is far more than this guy deserves. I wish people got this much attention for saying something really smart (which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t take notice when people with power believe this shit).
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard the “women can’t get pregnant from rape” line, although it is the first time I’ve heard it anywhere besides an anonymous troll in a comment thread. I guess that says more about the types of media I pay attention to than what’s actually being said out there. I think it’s more likely than not that Akin genuinely believes that women’s bodies contain some mechanism that halts reproduction whenever she doesn’t want to be penetrated,* because if you believe that, then you can believe the following:
1. Pregnancy is, in almost every case, proof that the incident wasn’t actually rape. If she’s pregnant, then that indicates she wanted to have sex, even if she claims (or even seems to think) otherwise. The 32,101 rapes that result in pregnancy each year are, therefore, not “legitimate” rapes.
2. We don’t need to talk about abortion after “legitimate” rape, because it’s such a rare occurance that it functionally doesn’t exist. It’s like deciding policy for unicorn management–find me an actual unicorn and we’ll discuss the management of unicorns, but until then, it’s not really worth arguing about. Sure, one or two unicorns (or women pregnant from rape) might slip through the cracks and yes that does suck for them and I’m sorry, but don’t we have more realistic problems to tackle?
When I try to put myself into Akin’s frame of mind, what I get isn’t malicious cynicism–“Mwa ha ha, now I shall oppress ALL the women!”–but rather simple-minded relief. What a relief that an issue that so many people think is so complicated is actually so simple! Raped women can’t get pregnant–phew! If only everyone knew what Akin knows! We could put this whole debate to rest!
And, of course, this type of rhetoric lumps together all women as if race, class, citizenship status, etc. made no difference in one’s chances of getting raped. Among other things, it reinforces the two interlocking myths that women of color a) have too many children b) because they are promiscuous. Meanwhile, just to pull something up from the first Google search that comes to mind, stuff like this is happening.
* I’ll point out here that sperm can stay alive for a few days in a woman’s body, meaning that if an egg is released after the rape has ended, then conception can still happen. Also, as my husband pointed out, if an egg has already been released before its owner is raped, that egg can’t be sucked back into the ovary. That woman is fertile for the next day or two no matter what. I’d love to hear how exactly Akin’s doctor buds think a woman’s body “shut[s] that whole thing down.”
You know what’s bothering me? If he had said the same vile nonsense he said, without using the sounds-even-worse-out-of-context phrase “legitimate rape” but rather “actual rape” or “genuine rape” or anything else, then the outrage would have been limited to a considerably smaller section of the population and he would not have faced sanctions from the Republican committee or anything like that.
Members of Congress are notoriously ignorant about science in general, and medicine in particular (remember the ‘doctor’ who claimed he could diagnose Terri Schiavo’s condition by watching a videotape?).
But Akin is actually on the House Committee on Science and Technology. That makes his ignorance even more pathetic.
The Onion has already printed a story:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/pregnant-woman-relieved-to-learn-her-rape-was-ille,29258/
[edit by Julie: trigger warning for rape description.]
Ha! Well said, Onion. Thanks for the link.
Gak. Double gak that as I look at commentary on this it appears that there are actually a not-insignificant number of people who agree with him.
Apparently if he quits before the end of today the GOP can pick a replacement for him on the ballot. It is rumored that during the primary numerous Democrats crossed over and voted for him in the GOP primary because they figured he’d be the easiest to beat. If that’s true, it looks as though they were right.
I liked this Onion article (they really had a field day with this one):
I Misspoke—What I Meant To Say Is ‘I Am Dumb As Dog Shit And I Am A Terrible Human Being’
I liked this comment from Talk of the Nation today:
Chingona, I adore that article so much.
It was repetitive but I liked all the angry repetition.
The problem with the theory of Akin being simple-minded instead of malicious is that no matter how you break it down, he is still saying that women who claim rape cannot be trusted.
Kay @9 – Well, it’s quite possible to say all sorts of horrible things without understanding what you are saying. But I don’t particularly think that it matters much, either – figuring out what Akin’s psychological state is and whether he hates women or is just very confused about them or something else is an issue for Akin and his personal friends and acquaintances. What’s important is that he, and people who think like him, are kept as far away from making public policy that affects women as humanely possible.
It’s quite possible that he’s a woman-hater, or at least a woman-mistruster. (Ha, I knew she was lying about the rape, she had a baby! I know that’s impossible.) I don’t know anything about him other than his name, state, and desired office.
I think it’s at least possible, however, for people to believe what he believes and not have it be from woman-hate or mistrust; I’ve heard something similar from women who were not self-haters. Not feminist icons of egalitarianism, but not “God my gender sucks, here let me conspire with you against them” types either.
Most strong political positions or rights positions have severe natural consequences or costs, and if you want to hold that position you have to own those costs, or at least admit them. I’m pro gun-rights; I have to accept that there are going to be killings that wouldn’t happen if my position wasn’t the law of the land. Amp and I are both pro-free speech; we have to accept that this means someone terrible somewhere is writing something awful that will inspire someone else to do something awful. If you’re pro-choice you have to accept that there are people who would have possibly been happy moms (or happy with a larger family) making the choice to abort instead and that fetus/baby/person will cease to be.
If you’re pro-life and consistently so (i.e., no exceptions) then you have to face that there are going to be involuntary pregnancies which are disastrous or highly burdensome (or even deadly) for the woman involved, as the result of rape or incest. Like most positions, this is a pretty awful thing to have to own; unlike most positions, there aren’t a lot of veils one can draw around it and be intellectually consistent. I can rationalize gun murders with the awareness of how much violence is prevented by passive carrying or brandishment; Amp and I can believe that the beauty of the poets’ work outweighs the unabomber manifesto; pro-choice people can take a harm-reduction position and say “even if some women would be happy as mothers and just don’t know it, the harm prevented by having abortion rights is far larger.”
For the strong pro-life position, it’s no so easy to handwave. You’re saying rape victims and 11-year old girls molested by their uncles and so forth have to do this incredibly difficult thing – something that cannot in fairness be asked of anyone, let alone an innocent victim. Involuntary pregnancy is slavery. Worse than slavery; relatively few slaves die but plenty of pregnant women do. Then tack on 18 years of indentured servitude, physical and economic. I have a friend who was raped in college and chose to bear the child; she’s now a single mom of a teenager. It was incredibly hard for her; I respect her tremendously for her choice but where the hell would I get off saying that everyone in her situation had to do the same thing? The occasional amazing person from history who was the product of rape doesn’t come anywhere close to justifying the position. My friend’s son is pretty cool. His mom is still someone who did something very difficult, not something perfectly easy.
So, people with the strong pro-choice position often end up – not because they’re terrible, but because they’re human – trying to deny or minimize the everyone-must-deliver element of the position because it’s a damn hard thing to justify and most people just don’t have the memetic range to do it easily. I can spit out why-we-need-guns rhetoric all day long; you-should-have-that-rapists-baby is something that I find agonizing and difficult to argue, and cannot in good conscience find any condemnation for people who believe differently.
TL;DR version: it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to find out that Todd Akin is a complete asshat, but there are some pro-choice people who have talked themselves into believing what he believes for relatively human, non-asshole reasons. They are wrong, and probably going out of their way to avoid acquiring data that would show them how wrong they are, but they aren’t doing it from malice. Other people are doing it out of malice (the science is pretty clear – surprise, rape victims often have higher rates of fertility than women trying to conceive) and a desire to keep women down, but not everybody. There’s a population that needs to get a swift kick in the ass or just a beating, but also another population where kindly, understanding outreach would have positive outcomes.
Here’s the dialogue that could logically occur based on Akin’s statement:
Woman: I was raped and got pregnant from the rape.
Akin: If you got pregnant, then it’s impossible you were raped. Your story of your personal experience is either inaccurate or a lie.
I don’t care about Akin’s psychological state. My point is that his simple “scientific” assertion would fall apart if he believed women were credible witnesses to their own experiences. If what women said mattered to him he’d say, “Oh. Hmm. Interesting. That doesn’t square with the medical information I have learned.”
That’s the most depressing thing I’ve heard all day. Admittedly, my day only started half an hour ago, but damn.
Kay – I take your point and you are right. The way he said it makes it clear what he believes.
Kelly – I am not sure on the sourcing of that, it was in an article I just read somewhere asking “well, is he right?” and concluding “hell, no.” There was formerly a medical theory that maybe forcible sex had a worse fertility rate since the woman’s system wasn’t receptive but it seems to be pretty well discredited by actual data. And yes, that’s pretty damn depressing.
Oh, hardly. Have you read the unabomber’s manifesto? No, you haven’t. No one has; it’s unreadable.
And the tragedy is, it was all so unnecessary. There are LOTS of well-written works on how humans are despoiling nature, but apparently the hyper-educated Kaczynski hadn’t read ANY of them. What do they teach in schools, anyway?
Hey Richard Jeffrey Newman — enough already with the poetry festivals and the Iranian literature thing. Why not teach a class for would-be supervillians about how to write your basic manifesto? Apparently there’s a desperate and unfilled need there.
I mean, if we have to put up with homicidal people, don’t we at least deserve to know why? It’s only fair.
Yes, what the world needs is more persuasive psychopaths.
One other point about Akin’s theory– what sort of research could it possibly be based on?
From the one article I read about the doctor who seems to be leading the “you can’t get pregnant from rape” movement, it seems like the general theory is that, since it is known that extreme stress can cause miscarriage, and rape is extremely stressful, rape must also cause miscarriage and/or prevent pregnancy. There really seems to be nothing beyond that.
Here’s the article that I had stumbled upon. I stumbled upon it again. Sorry, trigger warnings.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/08/how-often-does-rape-lead-to-pregnancy/261307/
Amp – do you want to comment on that? It looks like the rape-related pregnancy rate of 5.0% per rape is an estimate from the NWS.
To convert to a true fertility rate the denominator should be lower to exclude to digital/oral/anal rapes, and the numerator should be higher to exclude emergency contraception use and the 1/3 women on routine contraception. But I can’t see how you can do that and get anything even remotely biologically plausible.
I don’t think Akins’s position is based on any science or even on any pseudo-science; I think it’s based on “folk wisdom.” See, Aristotle taught that the female genitalia were analogous to male genitalia. And one of the ways that they were similar, he thought, is that no seed (semen for men, eggs for women) could be emitted without orgasm. Hence, no female orgasm = no pregnancy. Aristotle’s teachings on science were very well respected for many centuries, and the idea that women couldn’t get pregnant without orgasm was widely accepted. It was really only the Victorians, who didn’t think that ladies should have orgasms but knew that ladies had children, who started to dismiss the idea. It shows up in a lot of folk tales and sayings.
So if you can’t get pregnant without an orgasm, then you obviously can’t get pregnant from a rape. At least, not from a rape-rape, or a legitimate rape, or whatever Akins meant to say. Because if you had an orgasm, then it must have been one of those things where your lips said No but your ovaries were saying Yes, Yes, you lying hussy.
james,
I don’t even know how to parse your critique. The 5 percent derives from a survey of 4,000 women over some time period. Of the women who were raped, 5 percent got pregnant. You can say the sample size is too small (I don’t know enough about stats to say one way or the other), but it’s not based on some abstract subtract the percentage of anal rape and divide by the number of women on the pill blah blah blah. It’s pretty straight forward.
Sure. Say they were surveying child weight and got an average of 40 stone, we would know – no matter what their survey method – that their result was silly as it flies in the face of reason and all other evidence we have on the matter. We would know that there was some gross error and the study was flawed.
They say 1 in 20 rapes result in pregnancy. I’m asking is that reasonable based on what we know about fertility?
We have v good evidence that pregnancy rates for couples who want to get pregnant and are having sex 2-3x a week for a year are 80%-85% max. We also know pregnancy will be v rare in those raped women who will use contraception (coil/pill/sterilization), which should be at least 40-50% of them. We also know pregnancy will be impossible in oral rapes, for example. So it is not unreasonable to think their result implies a pregnancy rate in fertile rapes of 8%+.
That seems absolutely ridiculous. It is so high as to contradict everything we know about the basic biology of reproduction. I don’t see how anyone can believe such a number. There must be a gross error somewhere.
Perhaps you are right and their standard errors are very large. Or perhaps there is under-reporting of rapes which do not result in pregnancy, or fabrication of rapes after pregnancy. But that result cannot possibly be true.
Having read the study, I can think of several explanations to the 5% figure. First, let me clarify a couple of points – in my analysis that follows, I’m not critiquing the study, but rather the interpretation of the results as reported in articles such as the one Robert linked to. Second, whether the rate of pregnancies is significantly higher after rape than after consensual sex is perhaps unclear, but what is clear is that there is no reason whatsoever to believe that it is lower, and none of what I say below should be taken to mean that.
So, first – the 5% pregnancy rate is not an estimate. It is an empirical data point based on the women surveyed. This number is then used to estimate the overall number (not percentage) of rape-related-pregnancies in the US population at large. So, any issue of sample size and standard errors is only relevant when talking about this projection, not about the actual derivation of the 5% rate.
So that explanation is a non-starter. The other two proposals suggested by James – either that some of the women surveyed chose not to report rapes, or that some of the rapes reported were false – are possible explanations, as the study was conducted by a survey. However, there is no obvious (to me) motivation for the women in question to lie to the researchers. And even if a few cases were lies, that wouldn’t significantly change the results. Would a 4.6% rate of pregnancies after rape be more plausible to james?
So how do we explain the rate? The simplest explanation, in this case, is that pregnancy-related-rape does not mean what james and the article that Robert cited seem to think it means. The count of “cases of rape” is actually a count of how many women were raped, not of how many occasions of rape there were. A woman that was raped once by a stranger and one that was raped repeatedly by a relative would be each counted once. The researchers reported that over 40% of the rape-related-pregnancies happened as a result of multiple incidents of rape. It’s also worth noting that while the article doesn’t explicitly say how they defined a “rape-related-pregnancy”, it seems from a careful reading that it’s any case of pregnancy that was preceded by a rape in the appropriate time period for the rape to be the cause of the pregnancy. And given that 90% of the rape-related-pregnancies came from rape cases where the rapist was known to the woman, including nearly 50% of the cases where the rapist was the woman’s partner, that means that if a woman had unprotected consensual sex with a man on several occasions while she was ovulating, and was subsequently raped by him in the same time period, and then got pregnant, it would count as a “rape-related-pregnancy” even though the actual fertilization may have occured during consensual sex. It’s not implausible that this accounts for at least some of the cases of a rape-related-pregnancy where the woman in question was raped once.
Thus, I think it is probably unwarranted to deduce from this article that rape increases the rate of conception. But what can be safely deduced is that pregnancy-after-rape is both real and not particularly uncommon. Which I trust that no one here doubted in the first place. It’s worth noting that the study itself makes no claims about rape making pregnancy more likely than consensual sex.
I hope this addresses some of your concerns, james.
(As a side note, one thing I learnt from writing this post is that I find it extremely difficult to try to discuss rape in a detached scientific manner.)
Robert: I find it hard to believe that Akin was doing anything other than reciting a talking point. He’s of the right age to have forgotten that there is this new Internet thang, and if you say something dumbfuck, chances are that people outside of the tiny audience you are trying to impress may also heard of the dumbfuck.
I feel that Jessica Valenti’s helpful quiz sheds some light here.
Further to the post on Aristotle on the origination of the idea; according to a book I have (about the middle ages), Akin’s statement was a widely held belief in the middle ages, effectively due to the idea that women had to enjoy sex in order for pregnancy to occur. Although it’s good that women’s enjoyment of sex was considered important, the ramifications of the belief are clear.
Apparently an incorrect “fact” can persist for a very long time.
mythago@25:
You have to notice that something is implausible before it occurs to you to look it up.
Nancy @28: Even if it struck him as implausible, I doubt he would have cared. It’s a way of dismissing the issue of “what about rape victims?” and if it’s false, well, hell, do you want to save babies or don’t you? It just didn’t dawn on him that anyone outside of a sympathetic audience would hear it.
James:
“We also know pregnancy will be v rare in those raped women who will use contraception (coil/pill/sterilization), which should be at least 40-50% of them. ”
Where do you get the estimate that 40% to 50% of all raped fertile women are using those kinds of contraception?
Nancy:
“You have to notice that something is implausible before it occurs to you to look it up.”
Yeah – again, I’m kind of amazed at the number of people who sincerely think – and I include Rep. Akin in that class – that what he said is true.
It’s worth noting that 50% of the women in the study who became pregnant after a rape were minors (12-17 years old) and may not have had access to any of those means of contraception.
It’s possible that Aikin thinks women are just like ducks inside. This is what happens when you ban comprehensive sex education from schools.
I’ll also point out that this level of ignorance persists not only about rape and pregnancy, but about many other things the anti-science brigade dislikes as well. Like climate change. And gays. I just watched “The Education of Shelby Knox” the other night on Netflix streaming, and was… well actually not shocked at all to see a Lubbock, TX high school student say, with a straight face, that the average life expectancy of a gay person [sic]* was age 40 because they catch so many diseases due to their “lifestyle.” This is a common pseudo-science talking point among anti-gay factions and is, like so many religious beliefs masquerading as “just common sense,” entirely resistant to the influence of facts.
*Of course she meant gay men because she was talking about HIV/AIDS, but everyone knows lesbians only exist at parties anyway, and when we’re talking about how gays = deviants we’re really talking about gay men because GROSS buttsecks. See also the Boy Scouts, who would be out recruiting lesbian Scout Masters at every Pride event if they were actually concerned about keeping their Scouts safe from sexual assault by trusted adults, but really it’s just that GAY = MEN = BUTTSECKS = GROSS.
Eytan – thanks very much for that. I could only see the abstract.
Or perhaps they conducted a poor piece of work and then misrepresented their results? It stretches things a little to suggest that “per rape” shouldn’t be interpreted as relating to how many occasions of rape or “result from rape” just means occurred in an appropriate time period. I kinda feel vindicated in suggesting that what they were saying was ridiculous, but at the same time it’s just depressing how often these sort of claims just turn out to be exaggeration and distortion once you look behind them.
Eytan – thanks very much for that. I could only see the abstract.
Or perhaps they conducted a poor piece of work and then misrepresented their results? It stretches things a little to suggest that “per rape” shouldn’t be interpreted as relating to how many occasions of rape or “result from rape” just means occurred in an appropriate time period. I kinda feel vindicated in suggesting that what they were saying was ridiculous, but at the same time it’s just depressing how often these sort of claims just turn out to be exaggeration and distortion once you look behind them.
James – I don’t think that that’s a fair assessment of their research at all, actually. There’s absolutely nothing about the article that suggests that the work was anything but serious, or that their methodology was flawed, or that they tried to misrepresent or oversell their results. At worst it can be argued that they were using their terminology a bit loosely, and that they probably were intending it to a target audience who would read the entire article (which is quite frank about the limits of what the study covers) rather than just the abstract.
The claim that rape may be more likely to result in pregnancy than consensual sex is probably a misinterpretation, but none of the figures cited in the abstract are either exaggerations nor distortions.
It’s also worth pointing out that I am not an expert in this particular area; I know how to read academic papers and statistics and my university has access to this journal so I could read the whole article, but I wouldn’t treat myself as an authority here compared to the people who actually did the research.
Where do you get the estimate that 40% to 50% of all raped fertile women are using those kinds of contraception?
RonF: don’t wait underwater.
“The national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year. Among 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy, the majority occurred among adolescents and resulted from assault by a known, often related perpetrator.”
Is it possible that the skew toward rapes at young ages makes the pregnancy rate seem implausible when comparing to the fertility of women in their late thirties and early forties?
(This is brainstorming, not assertion btw).
Possibly. In the article, the only age groups compared were minors (12-17) versus adults (18-45). Older women were excluded from the study. While the rate of rape was higher in the younger group, the rate of pregnancies per rape was almost exactly the same between the two groups. However, there was no discussion of the distribution of pregnancies by age within the adult group, which would be necessary to answer this question.
I’m going to bow out of discussing this article any further, though. My goal originally was to address james’s assertions that the article only makes sense if it is based on false reporting by women. I hope I showed that that’s not the case, but I’m worrying that the discussion (of the article, which itself isn’t the topic of this thread) is almost entirely about hypothetical speculation as opposed to what the article actually is saying, which is no more and no less than the fact that rape-related-pregnancies are real and not very rare and that health care for women who were raped needs to take this into account.
I learned that the Democratic Congressional campaign committee is circulating a petition to remove Akin from the House Committee on Science and Technology.
http://dccc.org/pages/denounce-todd-akin
Copyleft, believe me – I can certainly sympathize with the viewpoint. But if you limit membership on that committee to Congressmen who don’t have at least one dumbass scientific misconception I’m going to guess that there won’t be anyone sitting on it.
Apparently some doctor named John C Willke is behind this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5v4W-4qCbU&feature=plcp
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/21/news/la-pn-doctor-behind-todd-akins-rape-theory-was-a-romney-surrogate-in-2007-20120821
I’ve read that pro-lifers want to diffrentiate between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” rape because they are afraid that an rape exception will just lead to women claiming falsely that they have been raped to get access to abortion.