Republican Senate Nominee: You can't get pregnant from rape

[General Zod]

http://gawker.com/5936050/republican-se ... imate-rape

Get ready for some cold, hard science facts.

Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri, doesn't think abortion in the case of rape is really an issue. That's because he has it on good authority that women don't get pregnant from "legitimate rape" anyway.

First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

The nonsense term "legitimate rape" aside, this claim is based on the belief that the female body won't let itself become pregnant during a rape, I guess because the women don't want to have a baby?

That does nothing to explain all the children born from rape and incest, or any number of accidental pregnancies. Women get pregnant without willing it all the time. Perhaps Rep. Akin would argue that their bodies simply weren't working hard enough.

But seriously, thanks for your insight, legitimate contender for public office in 2012.

You heard it straight from the horse's mouth, folks. Republicans don't believe women can get pregnant from legitimate rape. I think we've found something that trumps "You can't explain the tides." in terms of sheer ignorance.

[ArmorPierce]

That's funny considering that in reality a woman is more likely to get pregnant from a single occurrence of rape relative to otherwise.

[Skywalker_T-65]

That is one of many reasons why I'm not voting for this guy (I live in Missouri). That's just flat out stupid on so many levels...

[Terralthra]

The Democratic party actually spent money during the primary to get this guy nominated over the moderate Republican candidate, in hopes that he'd say shit like this and make re-electing McCaskell easy.

[Skywalker_T-65]

Yeah I know, which makes voting for McCaskell easier to do and expect it to work. Unless of course Akin gets the crazy rednecks out in force.

[Lost Soal]

Yeah I know, which makes voting for McCaskell easier to do and expect it to work. Unless of course Akin gets the crazy rednecks out in force.

Thats the problem though, this has more detail on this including his past statements regarding rape, but also includes some polltracker average numbers which show him WINNING!! Hopefully this changes that but for fucks sake, where do they come up with these people?

Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri who is running against Sen. Claire McCaskill, justified his opposition to abortion rights even in case of rape with a claim that victims of “legitimate rape” have unnamed biological defenses that prevent pregnancy.

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Akin said that even in the worst-case scenario — when the supposed natural protections against unwanted pregnancy fail — abortion should still not be a legal option for the rape victim.

“Let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work, or something,” Akin said. “I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.”

Video, clipped by the Democratic tracking outfit American Bridge (the full interview is below):

Akin is perhaps the boldest among a crop of conservative 2012 nominees who could hamper GOP efforts to take back the Senate in the fall. Akin has called for an end to the school-lunch program and a total ban on the morning-after pill.

His claim about “legitimate” types of rape is not completely foreign to the current Republican Congress, however. In 2011, the House GOP was forced to drop language from a bill that would have limited federal help to pay for an abortion to only victims of “forcible rape.”

Nor is this Akin’s first time suggesting some types of rape are more worthy of protections than others. As a state legislator, Akin voted in 1991 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.

The PollTracker Average shows Akin leading McCaskill by a margin of 49.7 percent to 41.3 percent.

Below are Akin’s comments in their full context (abortion question begins around the four-minute mark):

[General Mung Beans]

The Democratic party actually spent money during the primary to get this guy nominated over the moderate Republican candidate, in hopes that he'd say shit like this and make re-electing McCaskell easy.

How did that work exactly?

[Skywalker_T-65]

He's winning? Oh darn it...and cutting school lunches? What are we supposed to do, let the kids starve?!!

You can't make this stuff up can you...what a moron.

[Aaron MkII]

He's winning? Oh darn it...and cutting school lunches? What are we supposed to do, let the kids starve?!!

You can't make this stuff up can you...what a moron.

Why are you surprised? This is the Tea Party GOP MO, cut, cut, cut. Throw in idiotic statements about woman, then win.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Oh darn it...and cutting school lunches? What are we supposed to do, let the kids starve?!!

I recall some Republican Congressman years ago saying that hungry children learn better; so I expect the answer is yes.

[Terralthra]

The Democratic party actually spent money during the primary to get this guy nominated over the moderate Republican candidate, in hopes that he'd say shit like this and make re-electing McCaskell easy.

How did that work exactly?

Missouri primary: McCaskill and Democrats helped Republican Todd Akin to Senate nomination
By Keenan Steiner Aug 08 2012 11:30 a.m.
Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Democratic outside groups, pouring in over $1 million during Missouri's Republican Senate primary, got the guy they wanted: Rep. Todd Akin, who Tuesday upset two other Republicans to take the GOP nomination.

Recent polls have shown McCaskill trailing all three Republicans in head-to-head matchups, but Akin has the smallest edge. She is betting voters will see the six-term congressman -- who gave "thanks to God our creator" in his victory speech and has been endorsed by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian -- as too conservative.

Late in the primary, McCaskill hit TV and radio airwaves "criticizing" Akin, seen at right, as too conservative, a thinly veiled attempt to boost his chances in a primary where the GOP's right wing would have a disproportionate impact. The radio ad was paid for by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Though Akin did not have direct support from outside groups, he may have benefitted from the last-man-standing effect: Of all the outside groups targeting ads at GOP candidates that have been reported to the Federal Election Commission, 88 percent focused on attacking Akin's opponents: businessman John Brunner and former state treasurer Sarah Steelman. The biggest outside group has been Majority PAC, a  super PAC devoted to maintaining the Democrats' edge in the Senate. Majority PAC spent nearly $1.2 million in independent expenditures opposing the frontrunner Brunner, widely viewed as the biggest threat to McCaskill because he had the most centrist credentials of the GOP frontrunners as well as a personal fortune to invest in the race. A super PAC formed by Steelman supporters chipped in about $500,000 in anti-Brunner ads.

Overall, the race has attracted the fourth most independent expenditures of any Senate race in the country, according to Sunlight's Follow the Unlimited Money tracker, more than $3.7 million, a number certain to go up as November approaches, as McCaskill is a top GOP target. And that figure doesn't include spending that's not reported to the Federal Election Commission for television ads but for which we are beginning to see partial returns.

Hard to find political ads

Some journalists, citizens, and a government agency have been gathering the political ad buys collected at TV stations and posting them online. As of last week, the four biggest TV stations in the nation's 50 biggest markets have to post information on political ad buys on a Federal Communications Commission website. But the FCC ruling only requires reporting of ads beginning Aug. 2, leaving out much of the spending on in Missouri, where voters have been carpet-bombed over the airwaves. 

The FCC's new portal only covers the state's two biggest markets (St. Louis and Kansas City), and it is far from perfect. For example, Kansas City's local NBC affiliate filed an ad buy that was actually for the lieutenant governor's race under a folder for Now or Never PAC, the Sarah Steelman-backing super PAC.

The limitations of the data in Missouri highlight the motivations behind the Sunlight Foundation's Political Ad Sleuth project. Sunlight and its partners, led by FreePress.net, have been asking volunteers to help sort this newly posted information and go to their local stations to retrieve the political ads at stations not covered by the new rule.

MORE: Sunlight's Political Ad Sleuth Project

In the St. Louis and Kansas City television markets, ad buys posted in the Senate race -- the earliest from mid-July on --  total $861,246.

On St. Louis's NBC affiliate, the Chamber of Commerce dropped $159,450 to run ads from July 27 to Aug. 7 criticizing both McCaskill and Steelman. The Karl Rove-founded Crossroads GPS, which has been running anti-McCaskill ads, bought about $100,000 on the same station to run from today through Aug. 21.

Overall, the Senate race spending posted by stations in the two markets in recent weeks comes to:

pro-Brunner sources: $554,896
pro-Steelman sources: $133,845
anti-McCaskill sources: $98,475
pro-Akin sources: $41,575
pro-McCaskill sources: $32,455
Brunner's lead reflected his well-stocked, self-funded campaign: He spent nearly $7 million of his own money. He was on the airwaves long before Akin and and Steelman, who only started running ads in mid-July, according to Matthew Patane, the journalism student coordinator of Project Open Vault.

The mid-Missouri project has been categorizing all the TV ads that have run since January in the Columbia, Mo. television market, the state's fifth biggest.

The effort, run by a Professor David Herzog at University of Missouri's Journalism School, demonstrates how much political spending has been going on under the radar, in the form of ads that did not have to be reported to the Federal Election Commission because they were categorized as "issue" ads rather than "political" ads -- a distinction determined by whether or not the ads clearly identify a candidate and call for a vote for or against that person. The University of Missouri project has identified a whopping $2.4 million in political TV ad spending--more than 4,000 minutes of ad time--from January through late July--not including the most recent onslaught in ads, which Patane is still entering into the project's database. That number includes about $350,000 from the McCaskill campaign and $280,000 from the Brunner camp, campaigns required to disclose their donors and ad purchases.

Project Open Vault--which mirrors the national effort that Sunlight is undertaking with Political Ad Sleuth, also identifies shadow groups spending a combined $300,000 in mid-Missouri: the pro-Republican Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity, 501(c)4 "social welfare" groups that do not have to publicly disclose donors--or any spending that does not qualify as expressly political under FEC guidelines. Crossroads has hammered McCaskill with at least nine separate advertising campaigns since last year, which the group announces on its website. AFP announced an anti-McCaskill ad in late July. 

Patane spends more than 18 hours per week gathering the files from Columbia's three main stations and uploading them onto Document Cloud, which feeds into a database they created, he said.

This week alone, he found 100 pages of buys from one station, and 30 or 40 at the other two stations. He called the data "only a small window" of the rest of election spending in the Show Me State, which is a presidential battleground as well as the home to one of the nation's marquee Senate races. TV stations in Columbia will not be required to post their political files to the FCC portal until 2014.

Herzog, the professor behind the project, has been advocating for more transparency of election spending, even filing comments with the FCC.

"I'm a big advocate of getting information out of obscure places to places where people can actually use this information," he said.

(Jake Harper contributed reporting.)

[Alyrium Denryle]

You heard it straight from the horse's mouth, folks. Republicans don't believe women can get pregnant from legitimate rape. I think we've found something that trumps "You can't explain the tides." in terms of sheer ignorance.

No. Not ignorance. Willful stupidity. The fact of the matter is, a woman is more likely to get pregnant when raped, because a rape will often induce ovulation, which does not happen on a set schedule. Fuck this dude.

[One Two]

You heard it straight from the horse's mouth, folks. Republicans don't believe women can get pregnant from legitimate rape. I think we've found something that trumps "You can't explain the tides." in terms of sheer ignorance.

I know its this boards tendency to criticize republicans (not complaining), but don't generalize an entire group because one guy said something really stupid (on this subject).

[General Zod]

You heard it straight from the horse's mouth, folks. Republicans don't believe women can get pregnant from legitimate rape. I think we've found something that trumps "You can't explain the tides." in terms of sheer ignorance.

I know its this boards tendency to criticize republicans (not complaining), but don't generalize an entire group because one guy said something really stupid (on this subject).

Tell you what, let me know when Republicans stop using the word "liberal" as a pejorative and I might consider it.

[Gil Hamilton]

He's not exactly unique in that position. It falls out of tortured pro-lifer "logic". They want to ban all abortions, no exceptions, but making rape victims carry their attackers babies to term is net negative PR to them. Therefore, some have taken the take that if it is really rape, then the woman's body will magically not get pregnant... so there is no harm done in not making exceptions for rape victims except for unfortunate exceptions.

I recall Jesse Helms made the same argument once, so this has been around for a while.

[One Two]

You heard it straight from the horse's mouth, folks. Republicans don't believe women can get pregnant from legitimate rape. I think we've found something that trumps "You can't explain the tides." in terms of sheer ignorance.

I know its this boards tendency to criticize republicans (not complaining), but don't generalize an entire group because one guy said something really stupid (on this subject).

Tell you what, let me know when Republicans stop using the word "liberal" as a pejorative and I might consider it.

Fair enough.

[Gandalf]

You heard it straight from the horse's mouth, folks. Republicans don't believe women can get pregnant from legitimate rape. I think we've found something that trumps "You can't explain the tides." in terms of sheer ignorance.

I know its this boards tendency to criticize republicans (not complaining), but don't generalize an entire group because one guy said something really stupid (on this subject).

Look at it this way; the GOP endorse him as their candidate for office. He's a part of the Republican brand, and as such what he does in his capacity as a GOP guy reflects on them, and those who vote for them.

[Stark]

Isn't this a sideways way of pushing the onus of pregancy onto women? After all, if they don't want to get pregnant, 'they have ways of shutting that whole thing down'. Pretty much every pregnancy is because the woman wants it... so abortion is just them being selfish.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

So this guy is trying to tell us that a rapist who impregnated his victim shouldn't be punished at all, if I understand this correctly. And people are going to vote for this brain-fuckin', goat-lovin', rat-eatin' motherfucker* if I'm still getting it right which, because of the absurdity of the statement, I might not.





*The Rudy Ray Moore Insult: rebuke with style and substance!

[Terralthra]

So this guy is trying to tell us that a rapist who impregnated his victim shouldn't be punished at all, if I understand this correctly. And people are going to vote for this brain-fuckin', goat-lovin', rat-eatin' motherfucker* if I'm still getting it right which, because of the absurdity of the statement, I might not.

He's not saying rapists shouldn't get punished. He's saying abortion bans should not have exceptions for rape victims, because magic.

[Jub]

So this guy is trying to tell us that a rapist who impregnated his victim shouldn't be punished at all, if I understand this correctly. And people are going to vote for this brain-fuckin', goat-lovin', rat-eatin' motherfucker* if I'm still getting it right which, because of the absurdity of the statement, I might not.

He's not saying rapists shouldn't get punished. He's saying abortion bans should not have exceptions for rape victims, because magic.

I'm pretty sure that his logic actually works the other way.

(Rape ⇒ Not Pregnant) ∴ (Pregnant ⇒ Not Rape)

[NecronLord]

You heard it straight from the horse's mouth, folks. Republicans don't believe women can get pregnant from legitimate rape. I think we've found something that trumps "You can't explain the tides." in terms of sheer ignorance.

I know its this boards tendency to criticize republicans (not complaining), but don't generalize an entire group because one guy said something really stupid (on this subject).

Look at it this way; the GOP endorse him as their candidate for office. He's a part of the Republican brand, and as such what he does in his capacity as a GOP guy reflects on them, and those who vote for them.

Just out of curiosity, does the same logic work in reverse? If the Republicans can find a crackpot who happens to be a democrat running for congressional nomination who say, says he'll bring in a constitutional amendment to integrate the United States as a province of the People's Republic of China, and offers to be commandant of the first reform-through-labour camp, and the GOP funds him to secure the nomination, then does the entire Democratic party then need to be judged by what's said by this GOP funded whackaloon?

[Crossroads Inc.]

Once again someone gets in trouble for saying publicly what many on the far right (more than likely) really believe...

I just found out about this story, but already I can predict how it will end...
Mr. Akin will say he was "misquoted" or his words are taken out of context. He will then say he 'May have mispoke' and then finally that he is 'sorry if he offended anyone'.

At no point will he admit what he said is wrong, only that he is very sorry that OTHER people are upset about it.

[NecronLord]

Once again someone gets in trouble for saying publicly what many on the far right (more than likely) really believe...

Well, of course, I would imagine most pro-life "life begins at conception" (I am not, far from it) supporters think that women should be forced to carry to term where possible, even in cases of rape. Because if embryos and fetuses actually do have a right to live, then it's just punishing them for a crime their father committed. We don't have the police chase down rapists' children and shoot them in the head, and if you honestly believe that unborn embryos have the same status as children, then abortion in cases of rape is exactly that.

[Skywalker_T-65]

Remember guys...I live in Missouri. So I'm surrounded by people who buy into this guy, and LIKE what he says. Quite annoying really...