Posted on 08/21/2012 11:10:29 AM PDT by Maelstorm
Pregnancy loss is a common and painful condition for gestational women, accounting for 25-40% of total pregnancy, having become a serious social-medical issue worldwide. Animal studies and clinical investigations have indicated that the cause of many mid-term miscarriage/abnormal pregnancy has been seeded very early during the onset of embryo implantation. Epidemiological study also showed that maternal stress at early pregnancy is strongly associated with various complications during ongoing gestation. However, whether and how the process of embryo implantation is affected by environmental factors such as stress induced sympathetic activation remained elusive. Considering the mammalian uterus is an organ with extensive sympathetic innervations, the research group leads by Prof. Enkui Duan at Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences hypothesized that it is possible that around the time of embryo implantation, stress-induced sympathetic activation may directly affect embryo-maternal interactions through adrenergic receptors, therefore affecting the quality of ongoing pregnancy.
By using mouse model, the research group found an unexpected, transient effect of β2-Adrenoceptor (β2-AR) activation (Day4 postcoitus) in disrupting embryo spacing at implantation (without changing implantation timing), leading to substantially increased mid-term pregnancy loss. In vitro and in vivo studies demonstrated that the transient β2-AR activation abolished normal preimplantation uterine contractility, without adversely affecting blastocyst quality. The contractility inhibition is mediated by activation of cAMP-PKA pathway and accompanied with specific downregulation of lpa3, a gene previously found to be critical for uterine contraction and embryo spacing. These results recapitulated the concept that “on-site” intrauterine embryo location mediated by concerted uterine contraction is crucial for successful ongoing pregnancy.
(Excerpt) Read more at rpb.ioz.ac.cn ...
Research of Chinese mice? LOLOL!!!
It is infrequent, but does happen. For a politician to stick his foot so far down his throat his toes are coming out the other side has to be an idiot.
If he doesn’t understand that basic concept he has no business running for Senate. He should back out and let someone who has a chance of winning run.
That’s two points. Will you be arguing them separately?
(You can probably skip the second one, since nobody seems to disagree with it.)
Just keep on laughing, that isn’t the research I was referring to, as I stated, you probably aren’t interested.
Some women, just some, have this happen. Not all, has nothing to do with any circumstances except stress and how SOME women react.
This is what I got from the article.
A. It was in mice
B. The stress signal was 4 days after the sex act, not at the time of the sex act
Women have been conceiving and carrying pregnancies is stressful situations since the human race was brought forth. My BS meter is pegged on Akins remarks. He was wrong.
Oh, but I am! Do tell.
http://www.rebeccakiessling.com/index.html
http://www.lifenews.com/2012/08/20/woman-conceived-in-rape-responds-to-akin-abortion-controversy/
http://www.christianliferesources.com/article/rape-pregnancies-are-rare-461
You are likely correct on the placement of the foot, however,
I doubt he really believes intercourse does not equal pregnancy when the conditions are right. I believe he was suggesting the possibility was perhaps reduced based on some studies done on animals. Not to suggest any relationship, but stressed cows are less likely to conceive or maintain a pregnancy. I know, I know.
With the time line for other candidates to get in the race, the problem is now the GOP’s to deal with.
I’m making a judgement, that were you really interested, you would have been doing just what I was doing, and that is doing a google search on Rape and incest pregnancy statistics. There is plenty, as many states have done their own statistical studies in attempts to pass abortion legislation, especially when using the rape and incest, exception, speaking of the war on women.
Akin needs to step down. He is not only factually wrong, but politically tone deaf. Why should we support someone who so completely misses the real heart of the issue, the sanctity of human life, and instead insults rape victims?
Akin didn’t have the sense to articulate the position that unborn children should not pay for the crimes of their fathers with their lives. This is a reasonable position, that no unborn child is deserving of death. He could have even stated rape victims comprise a very small percentage of abortions in America. This is a fact, backed up by statistics.
However, stating a “legitimately” raped woman can “shut down” a pregnancy is completely unsupportable by fact. True, not a huge percentage of raped women become pregnant, for the following reasons:
1. They are past child bearing years.
2. They are on oral contraceptives.
3. They are not ovulating at that moment in time.
4. They took post-rape measures at a hospital.
However, for the remainder of these women, a pregnancy is very likely. If a woman is ovulating, she probably will get pregnant. Even if I grant you the possibility that stress might prevent ovulation, if a woman has already begun ovulation, this will not matter. The body makes no “magical” distinction, and biology takes over. The study you cited is relying on data from mice. It also did not state a miscarriage always takes place when a mouse is under stress, just that it may contribute.
The woman most likely to get pregnant during a rape is a woman who is not on oral contraceptives and who is morally opposed to the morning after pill.
Here is a link to an article about a woman who was the product of rape. They do actually exist, and this particular woman has some great advice about how to frame this debate:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2921259/posts
Im not saying that at all. I’m just responding to those who get all sanctimonious about science. I think Akin’s mistake was an overstatement based on probably a combination of things he’d read and been told. Women who are raped do very probably have higher miscarriage rates. The science suggests they should. There have been some studies that stress interferes with fertility but there are studies that claim that it does not. Does this mean if a women gets pregnant its not rape. Not at all. Even Akin didn’t claim that it was a certainity that this was the case he simply ventured a badly worded theory.
The point I’m making is there is no monothesistic science and usually what turns out to be true is not simple and easily uncapsulated in sound bites or made to fit perfectly in any one political box. If you really spend honest time studying and reading exposing yourself to the breadth of “science” you soon realize that there are many different facets of it and complex systems like sexuality and fertility in particular are still years away from being fully understood.
I just wish people would bother doing some research before assuming someone is just being an idiot. Akin did overstate the “science” but he wasn’t entirely off base.
no one in their right mind would make that arguement....we shouldn't allow abortion, even in the case of rape, because you are killing an innocent human being....that's arguement enough.
I think that was the point about Akin. And in fact, he didn't really want to make that argument, but that's what the logical conclusion of the supporting argument for Akin.
There's no reason to try to make the argument that women have some sort of protection from pregnancy if they are "legitimately raped". We would want to ban abortion in the case of rape whether there was ONE pregnancy a year, or a MILLION pregnancies a year, from rape. It makes absolutely no difference to the legitimate argument about not killing human beings because some other human being committed a crime.
But to defend Akin's comments, people have legitimately pointed out that women under stress self-abort. That is a sad fact of life. But it has no bearing at all on the argument against allowing abortion for rape victims. It WOULD be a valid argument if you were trying to say we don't have to abort them, because they can self-abort by being stressed. But that would be a stupid argument.
The logical conclusion is that you shouldn't bring up the rarity of rape pregnancies, or the rate of spontaneous abortion in stress cases, when your argument is that the death of a human being is a tragedy. The self-abortion of children of rape victims is a tragedy, just as if they were aborted by a doctor.
In fact, the pro-life argument here would be that we should increase the pregnancy rate for rape victims, because we should provide them counseling to relieve their stress and bring them to a peace about their child, to increase the chances of carrying to term.
But that argument is pretty much the opposite of the argument that banning abortion for rape isn't that big a deal since many women self-abort after a rape.
Actually, not. At least one study has shown that women who conceive through rape are less likely to have an abortion than women who freely choose to become pregnant.
Stress can reduce the number of implantations, and the number of early miscarriages (those that occur before the woman even suspects she is pregnant). That, along with the fact of physical injury caused by rape, decreases the chances of getting pregnant through rape. Stress can also cause later miscarriage.
Ugh, I need to just write up a good response to this and copy/paste it to every one of these posts. I learned in high school back in the 1970s that rape rarely leads to pregnancy (in fact, we were told that it just doesn't happen). Why, all of a sudden, is a fact that was known in the 1970s bogus just because a conservative politician stated it?
1) Half of all fertilized ova do not implant even under favorable conditions. Because of the stress and physical injury associated with rape, conditions are NOT favorable for implantation.
2) From 50 to 75% of implanted ova die before the woman even suspects she is pregnant. The stress of rape increases that number.
3) There is also an increased risk of miscarriage of confirmed pregnancies.
Although Akin clearly does not have scientific training and therefore couldn't express what he meant clearly or explain the mechanisms behind it, he was factually correct. A woman DOES have a very low chance of becoming pregnant after rape, a chance which is decreased to almost non-existent if she uses the "morning-after" pill that is routinely offered to rape victims.
His intent was not to insult rape victims--while I cannot know what he was thinking, it is possible that he had in mind the deception used to get abortion legalized in the first place (hint: Norma McCorvey aka Jane Roe falsely claimed to be pregnant from rape, not from consensual sex).
BTW, the article referenced above may be based on a mouse study (because we can do research on rodents that we could never do on people, and mice share many physiological traits with humans). But consider this quote from a human study: We should bear in mind that an acute-stress-induced surge of LH is shortly preceded by an elevation of serum progesterone from the adrenal glands. This fact suggests that such an elevation of serum progesterone may advance the secretory transformation of the endometrium resulting in embryo-endometrium asynchrony and consequently reduced chances of implantation and pregnancy if ovulation and fertilization took place. In plain English, these researchers showed that ovulation is likely to take place immediately after rape (LH=leutinizing hormone, which the body uses to signal an ovum to ripen and exit from the ovary), but that implantation is highly unlikely because the uterus is not ready.
Obviously, some women who are raped get pregnant ... unless you believe every one of them is a liar. What he said re-victimizes real or “legitimate”, if you will, rape victims. Even if he is correct factually, that it is significantly less likely, which I am not at all convinced, why kick victims when they’re down? The women who get abortions will not be stigmatized by this disinformation, but rather raped women who decided to keep these babies.
Also, take a look at the quote from the link you provided:
“It is known that the percentage of pregnancies resulting from single episodes of forced penile-vaginal intercourse (rape) is significantly higher (8.0% in a sample of 405 women from a national random-digit dialing sample of households in USA) than the percentage of pregnancies resulting from single episodes of consensual, unprotected intercourse (3.1% in a sample of 221 women with no fertility problems planning to become pregnant in USA)”
I don't think it does at all. I can't know what factors he was considering when he said that, but it's highly possible that he was criticizing the idea (promoted by abortion advocates) that a large number of abortions take place because of rape pregnancies. Dragging up rape victims as a reason all abortion for any reason should be encouraged is far more stigmatizing to rape victims, IMHO.
(8.0% in a sample of 405 women from a national random-digit dialing sample of households in USA)
Yes, I am aware of that quote in the article that I linked. The authors quoted it from another journal article as background for their study, and actually should have not used that reference, because it's very poor quality and should not have been published, IMO. The section I linked was the authors' analysis of experimental data they generated themselves, which I consider much more reliable than that one reference they mentioned.
First, it's ludicrous (because of the physical and mental trauma of rape) to think that the incidence of pregnancy from rape would be HIGHER than the 3.1% they said result from a one-time occurrence of consensual intercourse.
Second, because that referenced "study" was a random telephone survey, which makes its validity extremely questionable. A reliable study would depend on police and medical records to correlate confirmed rapes with confirmed pregnancies. Researchers performing that kind of study would probably examine hundreds of cases in order to do a proper statistical analysis.
Third, because in that sample size of 405 women, I doubt there are enough rape victims to make ANY kind of statistically significant assessment. According to a NY Times article, Nearly 1 in 5 Women in U.S. Survey Say They Have Been Sexually Assaulted (a figure which is also questionable, but I won't go into that), which would mean out of 405 women, there might be around 81 rape victims, of which 6 or 7 claim to have gotten pregnant. You simply cannot say with statistical certainty that 6 or 7 pregnancies out of 81 rape victims equates to an 8% pregnancy rate. Furthermore, once those rapes are broken down into categories for statistical analysis (e.g. morning-after pill: y/n, vaginal penetration: y/n, stranger forced rape vs. consensual statutory rape, etc.), the resulting categories would be so tiny that meaningful statistical analysis cannot be done.
Let’s say it’s four or five percent, not eight percent ... really, does it matter? Does that mean this particular five percent of women are somehow culpable? He could have said very few abortions, statistically, are due to rape. This is an indisputable fact. I don’t think anyone would have been offended by this statement of fact. Apparently, different people heard different things when he made this statement ... you and I included. This means he is a poor communicator. The pro-life movement needs someone who can articulate our values in an clear manner. I think he’s done more damage to the cause by his careless, and in my opinion, insulting statement.
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