Recovering From Rape [Book Excerpt; seems a pro-abortion author confirms Akin's statement]

It doesn’t confirm what he said. Pregnancy from rape is rare because rape is much rarer than consensual sex, and the odds are against getting pregnant from a single instance of intercourse. His theory about a woman’s body having ways of shutting down it it’s rape is nonsense.

If you take the statistics regarding all reported rapes as a whole (keeping in mind that rape continues to be an underreported crime) and take into consideration all the women’s ages; postmenopausal or elderly women or young girls who haven’t reached menses yet along with fertile women who may be on the pill or where she is in her monthly cycle and those rapists who use condoms (and yes some do because they think that keeps them from getting caught) and those rapists who are unable to “complete” and women who are taken to the hospital and given “morning after pills”, then yes, taken as a whole, pregnancy as the result of rape is probably relatively low (depending on who you want to believe – 5% to 1%), but it does happen and has for millenniums. Don’t forget that rape was and still is in some parts of the world used as a weapon of war not only to demoralize the women and their husbands and families but also, for lack of a better word, to “pollute” or change the gene pool as a way to subjugate the defeated.

While it is true to some extent that a woman under a prolonged and extreme amount of stress is more likely to have trouble conceiving or miscarry, there is no biological function that I know of that keeps a woman from getting pregnant or “shutting down” just because she doesn’t want to get pregnant. If that were the case, birth control would be mostly unnecessary. It was a stupid thing for him to say and he deserves to get smacked for it.

Where I take even greater issue with Mr. Aiken’s comment was the term “legitimate” rape.

If by this he meant to say rape vs. women who lie about being raped or would lie about being raped if abortion were only allowed in those circumstances, then he has a point. However that’s not what he said. By using the term “legitimate” rape, whether that’s what he meant or not, he seems to be saying (and rightly or wrongly it will be interpreted that way) that among actual rapes some are more “legitimate” than others, based perhaps on the level of violence or how violently she fought back or whether the woman knew her rapist beforehand, that for instance “date” or acquaintance rape or use of a date rape drug isn’t really “rape-rape” or that a woman who dresses provocatively or invites a date into her home after an evening out and a few drinks was just asking for it, then IMO he is a bigger idiot for saying that than for saying few rapes result in pregnancy.

From Christian Life Resources

Uh, I don’t know where Christian Life Resources gets their medical information but they are vastly twisting the facts. And on one hand they admit that “no one knows” “what further percentage reduction in pregnancy will this cause” but then they go on to claim it “certainly cuts this last figure by at least 50 percent and probably more”. Wow, talk about pure conjecture.

Yes, prolonged periods of severe stress can effect a woman’s cycle and prevent ovulation but the key words here are prolonged and severe. If a woman is ovulating normally when all of a sudden she is raped, it is not as if the stress of being raped is going to suddenly stop that ovulation or keep fertilization from taking place. Yes, women under prolonged and severe stress are more likely to stop menstruating or to miscarry but again that’s under prolonged periods of extreme stress, but even if stress alone were such a factor then few women would have become pregnant during wars or during the Great Depression or in any number of high stress periods of her life and times and I would also mention that there were even cases of women becoming pregnant and giving birth while held in Nazi concentration camps. If that isn’t stressful, I don’t know what is.

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/dachauscrapbook/DachauBabies.html

If you are going to make the case that abortion should not be allowed at all in any circumstance, even in cases of rape and incest, then take the high ground and say so. But then don’t trot out unsupported unscientific claims that raped women “rarely” if ever become pregnant and make it sound as if that’s fact when that simply isn’t true. That sort of thing makes it hard for us pro-lifers and is quite frankly insulting to those women who were raped and gave birth to children resulting from their rape rather than aborting them, either giving them up for adoption or keeping and raising them themselves.

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