whats really said is that this proves that the schmuck didn’t misspeak , but there are morons who actually believe this nonsense.
Akins is a maladroit who does no good to the country, the Republican Party, the Conservative movement or the pro-life cause by staying in the race. We need to run and elect conservative statesmen, and the stateman-like action would have been to drop out of the race.
Even were it established by rigorous scientific study that the probability of conception in instances of forcible rape was far less than the probability in consensual sexual intercourse due to some hormonal effect of trauma, that fact would not be interesting in the consideration of abortion policy. Akins’ did a disservice to the pro-life cause by bringing up the hypothesis as if it were fact, and worse by making the assertion absolute rather than probabilistic.
The only questions of import to abortion policy are which abortions are justifiable homicides, and which are murder. (I remind you all of the case of ectopic pregnancies, in which if the child continues to grow, the mother will at best suffer grievous bodily harm, at worst die, and the child will die. Ending such a pregnancy ends the life of a unique, distinct human being, but is in the nature of self-defense. Those pro-lifers in favor of a rape exception argue that forcing a woman to carry the rapist’s child to term is a continuation of the assault, and, thus, in this instance, too, an abortion is in the nature of self-defense.)
That said, the brouhaha over Akins’ use of the word “legitimate” as a modifier on “rape” is sheer propaganda. It is not Akins who has muddied the definition of rape. Rather the use of the word “rape” modified with the adjective “statutory” to denote consensual sexual intercourse when a legislature has created the legal fiction that persons who have not passed some arbitrarily chosen age (generally in the range between 14 and 18) cannot consent to sex, and one of the parties had not reached that state’s chosen age, and the bizarre stretches to its meaning advocated by feminists — the most extreme example being Andrea Dworkin, whose writings read as if she regards all heterosexual intercourse as rape, though she and her apologists have been at pains to deny this, but who most assuredly asserted that “In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine,” thereby effacing any distinction between gently wooing into consenting to fornication and the violent violation of a person (usually female) traditionally called rape (cf. also the notion of “rape” under which Sweden wants to prosecute Julian Assange).
Most would like to gloss Akins’ “legitimate” as a fumble of “forcible”, especially given his hypothesizing a lower pregnancy rate which would have no basis whatsoever even in theory, in the case of the nubile 16 year old in an age-of-consent-18 state willingly surrendering her chastity, But perhaps he was trying to draw a distinction not between forcible rape and statutory rape, but between rape and false accusations of rape (cf. Tawana Brawley and Crystal Magnum). Whatever he meant, he made a muddle of it, perhaps because he wasn’t thinking clearly about what distinction he wanted to make. I remind those who want to lionize him as a stalwart pro-lifer that the pro-life cause does not need muddled spokesmen, but champions who can speak with clarity about moral issues to hostile interviewers and audiences. Akins is no such champion.
Stupak and his pals will always have to answer for OsamaObamaCare....this clown just might have far *more* to answer for come November if he doesn't withdraw