Last Updated, 12:22 a.m. Representative Todd Akin, the Republican Senate nominee from Missouri, gave new prominence to an old myth this past weekend when he downplayed the need for rape victims to have access to abortions. He claimed that pregnancies from rape are “really rare,†because, “If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.â€
As Sarah Kliff reports on the Washington Post's Wonkblog, there is no scientific evidence for the claim that Mr. Akin, a member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, attributed to unnamed “doctors.†According to a study cited by the Centers for Disease Control, “an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year,†in the United States, meaning that a bout 5 percent of women who are raped do become pregnant.
Despite the facts, the ancient idea that women have some natural defense against being impregnated by rapists has been endorsed several times in recent years by elected officials who oppose abortion.
During a 1998 Senate campaign in Arkansas, the Republican candidate Dr. Fay Boozman claimed that hormones generated by fear usually prevented rape victims from getting pregnant, according to the doctor's remarks in a report in The Times that year:
His reasoning: Pregnancy rarely occurs after rape because the stress of the assault triggers a biochemical reaction in the victim that makes conception unlikely. The Senator, who also is an ophthalmologist, said he knew this to be the case from anecdotal information he had picked up over the years and from his own medical residency in the 1970's at the University of Arkansas Medical Center.
After he lost that election, Dr. Boozman was appointed to run the Arkansas Department of Health by the governor at the time, Mike Huckabee.
As David Waldman, a Daily Kos editor, noted on Twitter, the argument Mr. Akin advanced last weekend was even more similar to one floated in 1995 by a dentist named Henry Aldridge, who was then a Republican member of North Carolina's state legislature. As The Associated Press reported at the time, during a 1995 debate over a proposal to eliminate a state abortion fund for poor women, Mr. Aldridge claimed, “The facts show that people who are raped - who are truly raped - the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work and they don't get pregnant.†When Mr. Aldridge was pressed to explain his comments, he added: “To get pregnant, it takes a little cooperation. And there ain't much cooperation in a rape.â€
The Buzzfeed blogger who writes as Southpaw traced the idea back another decade, finding a 1988 report from the Philadelph ia Daily News on a Republican state legislator in Pennsylvania, Stephen Freind, who claimed that the chances of a woman getting pregnant from rape were, “one in millions and millions and millions.†Mr. Freind gave a version of the same explanation then that Mr. Akin relied on: the trauma of rape, he claimed, causes women to “secrete a certain secretion†that kills sperm. When the newspaper asked a professor of obstetrics and gynecology for a response, he said simply: “There's no basis for that. That's nonsense.â€
Despite constant debunking, this old husbands' tale has endured for centuries. “The legal position that pregnancy disproved a claim of rape appears to have been instituted in the U.K. sometime in the 13th century,†the medical historian Vanessa Heggie wrote in a blog post for The Guardian on Monday. She explained that one of Britain's earliest legal texts, written in about 1290, included a clause based on this bit of folk wisdom: “If, however, the woman should have conceived at the time alleged in the appeal, it abates, for without a woman's consent she could not conceive.â€
Ms. Heggie added: “the idea that a women had to orgasm in order to conceive (although not necessarily at exactly the same time as her male partner) was widespread in popular thought and medical literature in the medieval and early modern period. By logical extension, then, if a woman became pregnant, she must have experienced orgasm, and therefore could not have been the victim of an ‘absolute rape.'â€
On Monday, Mr. Akin appeared on Mike Huckabee's radio program and said, “I was talking about forcible rape.†As Slate blogger David Weigel explains, the use of that term in a bill introduced by House Republicans last year - and the apparent effort to create tiers of rape in federal law - provoked controversy. While the term was eventually dropped from the legislation, Mr. Akin, and Representative Paul Ryan, were among the co-sponsors of the original bill.
While Mr. Akin's remarks about rape drew the most attention, another part of his answer explaining his opposition to abortion also contained some curious logic. When the subject of abortion was first raised (about two minutes in to a longer clip of the Missouri television interview), the congressman digressed to say:
One of the things that I love about this country is the fact that Americans do consider life really important. And it's not because of some theoretical thing, that you're on a talk show and somebody asks you about it, but you have September 11th, and you've got these guys that are running into a building that's about to collapse; they find somebody in a wheelchair - they never check their ID, or anything like that, or whether they're important - they grab ‘em and they get ‘em to safety and they run back and get another one.
