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
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.