Missouri Republican: 'Legitimate rape' rarely causes pregnancy

[Admiral Yi]

Of every 100 women whose partners use withdrawal, 4 will become pregnant each year if they always do it correctly.
Of every 100 women whose partners use withdrawal, 27 will become pregnant each year if they don't always do it correctly.

[/quote]

[Ideologue]

I've seen 4% vs. .3% for perfect compliance, so yeah, I guess it's not as effective.  But that 4% seems really high to me.

An interesting factoid--did you know that birth control pills only became legal in 1999 in Japan?  And that only 1% of people use them?  I'm pretty sure that 1% is entirely the cast of the movies I've seen.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5726375/ns/health-womens_health/t/japanese-women-shun-birth-control-pill/

[Ideologue]

Also, I'd think compliance would be easier for doing one really obvious thing than remembering to take a pill every day.

[garbon]

Also, I'd think compliance would be easier for doing one really obvious thing than remembering to take a pill every day.

I disagree. I think compliance would probably be easier for a pill rather than pulling out as only one of the two involves a person, in the moment, who isn't thinking clearly.

[garbon]

Don't think Romney could be more clear there.

And like I said before, a Sunday night press release isn't going to cut it.  He'll be dealing with this all week.

Again not really dealing if you've already strongly condemned it. Sure a few outlets might continue to harangue his campaign about this, but the answer is already in hand. Therefore as Berk said it's a flash in the pan issue.

[CountDeMoney]

I think compliance would probably be easier for a pill rather than pulling out as only one of the two involves a person, in the moment, who isn't thinking clearly.

Yeah, I would think so, too;  and guys aren't the only ones that don't think clearly in those situations, either.

[garbon]

I think compliance would probably be easier for a pill rather than pulling out as only one of the two involves a person, in the moment, who isn't thinking clearly.

Yeah, I would think so, too;  and guys aren't the only ones that don't think clearly in those situations, either.

Yep to that second bit.

[Razgovory]

Figured CdM would pick this one up.  Akin is just dumb, that's his problem.  I'm surprised he doesn't think babies come from storks or something.  And just you watch, he'll win the Senate race.  A lot of money is coming in out of state to help him.  Strangely from Iowa.  Yi is probably involved.

[Razgovory]

You say that in past tense, like it actually stopped or something.

Harry hasn't recanted either, last time I checked.

Why should he?

[Viking]

My Health teacher in high school (a really nice guy but very religious) tried to tell us that rape doesn't result in pregnancy because the rapist almost never ejaculates. 

It's not funny, this is disgusting. He is doing what the mormons call lying for the lord. And yes, it is doctrine. He is lying or somebody else he trusts is lying vicariously through him so that people don't use condoms and to try to justify to himself that rape babies aren't really rape babies, but lying jezibel babies.

You can tell all that about him based on two lines from derspeiss' post?

Because it represents a real trend in american society.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/08/20/todd_akin_s_legitimate_rape_comment_not_a_misstatement_but_a_worldview_.html

Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri, the Republican candidate for the Missouri Senate race, told a St. Louis news station on Sunday that “legitimate rape” rarely causes pregnancy: “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

He later took it back, but this wasn’t a misstatement. It wasn’t a gaffe or a stray bit of medical misinformation that could have attached itself to any one of us. The statement was a crystallization of Akin’s worldview: sexist, blame-shifting, and profoundly ignorant.

In case anybody missed this dig at the “no means no” crowd, “legitimate rape” is a coded phrase meant to distinguish between a stranger attacking you in a parking garage, or, say, your date or your youth pastor doing the same. If you’re tipsy or wearing a short skirt, it’s not rape-rape, etc.

The statement was actually intended to soften Akin’s absolute opposition to abortion, even in the case of rape or incest. Why bother to have loopholes for such conditions when they’re going to be so rare, goes his thinking? As Talking Points Memo notes, the Congressman has long suspected that rape and abortion laws are less likely to protect women from abuse than to allow them to be abusive:

Akin’s past includes praising a militia group linked to anti-abortion extremism in the 1990s and voting against creating a sex-offender registry in 2005. Back in 1991, as a state legislator, Akin voted for an anti-marital-rape law, but only after questioning whether it might be misused “in a real messy divorce as a tool and a legal weapon to beat up on the husband,” according to a May 1 article that year in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (via LexisNexis).

The sexism is outrageous, but it’s the stupidity that really burns. It takes a lot of work for a member of the House science committee to cultivate an ignorance of science as profound as Todd Akin’s. It’s not accidental and it’s not incidental to his worldview—his belief system requires a rejection of science.

The thing about science, as Neil DeGrasse-Tyson says, is that it’s true whether you believe it or not. And the truth is that biology does not give a goddamn how sperm meets egg, whether it’s within the bounds of a sanctified marriage, in a test tube, or after a rape.

One of the great gifts of modern medicine is that we can control when and whether eggs are released (through the pill), whether sperm encounter the egg (condoms or vasectomy), whether a fertilized egg implants in the uterus (IUDs), and yes, whether it stays there (abortion). Trauma may increase the spontaneous miscarriage rate, but the effect is trivial, and tens of thousands of women are impregnated by rape annually.

But if you believe that the Bible is the “inerrant word of God,” as Akin apparently does, given his Master of Divinity from the Covenant Theological Seminary, then you can believe all kinds of things. That the world is 6,000 years old, for instance, and that evolution is a conspiracy organized by pretty much every biologist, geologist, paleontologist, ecologist, biochemist and geneticist working in the past century and a half, plus Satan. If God can produce Jesus through a virgin birth, he can certainly prevent a worthy-enough victim of “legitimate rape” from carrying her rapist’s child.

(And just to be clear, it’s not that he’s up on the latest evolutionary biology speculation about sperm priming and miscarriage. This idea has been bouncing around conservative circles for years as an excuse for defending an absolute ban on abortion.)

Akin and other Missouri conservatives are now trying to perpetuate this massive misinformation campaign on school children. Missouri’s “Right to Pray” amendment, which passed this month, allows kids to opt out of any educational assignments that conflict with their beliefs. As the National Center for Science Education has pointed out, that means children have a legal right to refuse to participate in biology class. Or, presumably, sex ed, where they would have to learn about basic reproductive biology, a class Todd Akin apparently skipped.

It is part of a long standing religiously motivated attempt at regulating the and controlling sexual activity in all of society. By pretending that being rape-raped can't get you pregnant means you don't have to accept the moral argument for abortion in the case of rape or incest, you just assert (contrary to the evidence of course) that since she got pregnant she was to blame.

This is the main reason that I think religion is bad and something should be done about it is people like Akin and his useful idiots who prance around claiming that faith is a good thing when the only thing it really does re-enforce and support mysogynists like Akin in his campaign to oppress women and take away their ability to use science, technology and knowledge to control their bodies.

There are no facts supporting any form of hypothesis on how condoms don't work or rape-rape can't make you pregnant or properly performed abortions are highly dangerous etc.etc. these are assertions de anus. The only purpose of which is to invent facts which supposedly support conclusions already gained from religious texts. Lying for the Lord, like you did when you claimed to have evidence for the existence of god which, when examined you did not.

[garbon]

Viking wall of text on religion : *presses ignore*

[Admiral Yi]

Why should he?

The same reason the birthers should.

[Viking]

Viking wall of text on religion : *presses ignore*

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[Barrister]

Viking:

[Razgovory]

Why should he?

The same reason the birthers should.

And what reason is that?