Update: The WH responds and it’s good to see dems hitting the GOP over the head with their own culture war club.
Akin’s comment in which he accidentally told what he really thinks, known in teaparty circles as misspeaking, didn’t come out of nowhere. Just as teajihadists have their own creationist pseudo-biology and their own evangelical pseudo-history, they also have their own reproductive pseudoscience in which rape victims can’t get pregnant. You know, if it’s a legitimate rape and not some loose ungodly slut lying about getting her rockettes off:
TPM — In 1988, Stephen Freind, a state representative in Pennsylvania, defended his no-exceptions anti-abortion stance — as Akin was doing Sunday — by claiming that it was virtually impossible for a woman who is raped to become pregnant. “The odds are one in millions and millions and millions,” Freind said in a debate in March of that year. “And there is a physical reason for that. Rape, obviously, is a traumatic experience. When that traumatic experience is undergone, a woman secretes a certain secretion, which has a tendency to kill sperm.”
Freind promised to provide scientific documentation of his theory and told a cheering crowd later that month, “If you’re expecting me to back off, the answer is no.”
Seven years later, a state legislator in North Carolina championed the same theory. Henry Aldridge, a Republican state representative, argued for the elimination of a public fund to help poor women pay for abortions by using a similar argument. “The facts show that people who are raped — who are truly raped — the juices don’t flow, the body functions don’t work and they don’t get pregnant,” Aldridge told the House Appropriations Committee. “Medical authorities agree that this is a rarity, if ever.”
Big surprise, they’ve made up some fake pseudoscience, convinced themselves it’s legit, and by an amazing coinkidink it also supports their political ideology and the tax cuts for billionaires that come along for the ride. How conveeeniient!
It turns innocent rape victims who get pregnant into willing dirty little whores and liars, but sacrifices have to be made for Republican Jesus, yo.
This would make a great question for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan: Do you agree with members of your party who claim there are secretions released by raped women that abort any resulting pregnancy?
It has been around a long time. I remember my 10th grade biology teacher telling our class the same thing in 1972, but it is apparently much older. A story I read this morning had this bit of history.
The story also mentioned a similar comment in Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, written by Samuel Farr, in 1814.
Apparently we can’t say that some of the more extreme right-wingers have let hundreds of years of science contaminate them.
According to Planned Parenthood (cuttletip to Hatfish.. I mean, hat-tip to Cuttlefish):
So, yeah, wow. I guess those “one in millions and millions and millions” odds are closer to 1 in 20. But hey, what’s a few (minimum of five) orders of magnitude amongst friends?
Wingnuts need to learn that getting a master’s degree in divinity from a fundjelical diploma mill doesn’t make you a medical expert.
It is fascinating to see, as several readers pointed out in the earlier thread, the fakery these poor guys and gals have been led to believe break on the rocks of fact. Some of them seem genuinely surprised that the stuff they’ve been told is completely bogus, in a sense they are victims of the wingnut success in insulating them from the real world and the base set of facts most people in it work with.
I looked up War Rape in Wiki, and looked for numbers of pregnancies due to rape. Few numbers, but the article reported that 3.7% of births in East Germany after WWII were due to rapes, and that about 1% of the hundreds of thousands of women raped in Rwanda during the Huttu-Tutsi massacres resulted in births.
Of course, many of the rapes were followed by murders of the women, so the numbers were certainly lower than if the women had survived.
Warning: the article will turn your stomach.
Guys, we’re talking about Tea Party republicans, here.
Should we really expect anything different from them?
But then they shrug their shoulders and convince themselves that while the medical study hasn’t actually said what they thought it said, it just a matter of time until their thoughts are proved correct — so carry on fellers. We’ve got an election to win.
@ 4
Not so much, it is more a case that any surprise they might exhibit is that anyone should have the audacity to call them on it!
Modus operandi usually dictates after the initial furore has faded and they are facing what they consider a ‘sympathetic’ audience, they repeat the exact same codswollop verbatim!
These memes are passed down generation unto generation, they are tried and tested sound bytes, they will not ditch them for all the evidence in every library in the world…after all they have fuck all else in the way of balanced persuasion in their rhetoric.
When push comes to shove emotive, hand wringing and outright blatant lies about awkward points trumps integrity every time.
When all is said and done there is but a cigarette paper width b’twixt ‘n’ b’tween the delivery of rethuglian political dogma and evangelical xianity.
They both rely on conning the audience and they are both founded on the principle that the legions they harangue are not particularly astute and not particularly educated.