Replies

There are many statistics. Of course, you can’t find an easy apples-to-apples comparison. For example, overall, you are slightly more likely to end up pregnant from a consumated rape than from a consensual consumated sexual encounter.

But that is in part because protection is more often used by those in consensual sexual relationships. And because the statistics are years old, and don’t take into account the recent practice of using post-rape abortion morning-after pills to stop pregnancy resulting from rape.

It is clear that stress has some impact on the ability to get pregnant. While some here were laughing about that yesterday, most of us who opposed Akin’s comments weren’t making that mistake. The problem is that stress does not “greatly reduce” pregnancy. Even Wilke, cited here yesterday in support of the concept, chose to believe it had a 50% reductive effect. Large, but not orders of magnitude.

Unfortunately, that is somewhat mitigated by the virtual certainty that the rapist isn’t using condoms, and the good chance that the woman wasn’t prepared and didn’t therefore have her own protection deployed. And of course, the man wasn’t trying to choose times when the woman was less likely to get pregnant.

Of course, the fact that we are even TALKING about this is the reason many of us were upset at Akin’s comments. It was an absurd choice of argument, it muddied the waters for the legitimate pro-life argument, and it distracted from the real issues. It allowed the liberals to smear all republicans with the false charge that we don’t think women can get pregnant from rape.

It also fed right into the “war on women” meme, with his use of “legitimate rape”. It reminded people of Ryan’s vote for the “forcible rape” bill — which actually can be explained, but is again a distraction and hurts us with women.

If we are going to argue about abortion, let’s keep it simple — abortion is wrong because it kills human beings, and we don’t kill innocent people to fix criminal actions.