Well, well, well..........
The ole rush to judgement again!
Nope, sorry, this can’t be right. Four out of five experts at FreeRepublic agree this is bull$hit. There is no magic button that turns off the pregnancy machinery during rape.
Besides, this was probably written by a man, who knows nothing about women’s bodies.
I would bet that millions of government dollars have been spent on studies having something to do with preventing stress from destroying a pregnancy - probably funding supported by Democraats. For what it’s worth.
We’re in a society where science and facts don’t matter; all that matters is what the media can get people to believe.
I think that’s the definition of post-modernism, and it is one of the last steps before the death of a society.
Sad.
This is a horrific insult to any women who has ever been impregnated by a rapist. Basically, you’re saying, just as that nitwit Akin said: if a women reports that she was raped and is then impregnated, it wasn’t rape after all? She enjoyed it? SHe asked for it?
Please explain.
I've been on the net for the last three hours trying to find something to bolster my comment of yesterday that wondered whether a raped woman secreted adrenaline or some other antigen that would make her womb inhospitable to unwanted sperm.
Freepers tore into me for my stupidity!
If they are saying that women so traumatized and shaken are at a higher risk of miscarriage, then yes, that’s likely true.
That’s a long way from what Akin said.
Nice find. There is a difference between reduce the chance and eliminate all possibility, and so there is a difference between rare and non-existant. The first problem is that most people aren’t up for subtle distinctions, and the second is that poorly phrased it is a loosing issue. That said, if one is interested in truth and life, the facts are worth thinking about.
A ChiCom study. Really?
Thanks, Maelstrom. I’m still of the opinion that factors such as this are not enough to make pregnancy resulting from rape “rare,” but it’s useful to see the research and the possible mechanisms at work.
I’m not going to criticize this for being an experiment on mice, because one of the articles I posted, that acute stress may induce ovulation, largely relied on animal models as well.
Human reproduction differs from the reproduction of other mammals and I don’t think animal experiments can settle the quesstion.
AKIN WAS RIGHT.
I am not a mouse.
It reminds me why there are only a very few Freepers I trust with science. Also one of the reasons the Global Warming threads here are mostly a joke.
Its not even worth getting into it here, I give up.
That isn’t “prevention of pregnancy”. It’s “messes up the pregnancy and causes a spontaneous abortion”.
If the argument is that we don’t need to allow abortion for rape victims, because if they are stressed out and sad enough long enough, they will self-abort, then I guess you have us there.
Oddly, there are many living people who were conceived in rape, where I guess their mothers didn’t stress enough.
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
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
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