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Monday, August 20, 2012

Rep. Akin "no pregnancy from rape" comment

Missouri Representative and U.S. Senate candidate Jim Akin is in scalding hot water for recently saying that...

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors, [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

Put another way, if a woman gets pregnant as a result of a rape, she wasn't really raped.  As a father of three daughters, I find his comment to be disgusting.

To be fair for a moment, this kind of ignorant spew is not new; a decade or two back, Pennsylvania's own Rep. Stephen Friend made a similar comment.  See citation HERE.  Like Akin now, Friend eventually backed off of his statement (citation HERE), but the damage was done.

Let's set the record straight:  Rep Akin and Stephen Friend are both categorically, 100% wrong.  Just two of hundreds of available citations can be found HERE and HERE.  Basic biology dictates that if a woman has an egg that can  be fertilized...and it is fertilized...she will get pregnant.  Period.

The quick-n-easy thing to do here is to make this a political issue.  It isn't.

This issue isn't about abortion either.

This is an issue of common sense.  It is an issue of basic science and biology. It is an issue of basic empathy and understanding.  It is about treating the victims of a horrible crime like victims, not criminals.

The fact that we are even having this discussion in 2012 is shameful.

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