Akin Clarifies ‘Legitimate Rape’ Comments: Women Make ‘False Claims’ About Being Raped
Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) announced that he will continue with his race for the U.S. Senate, during an appearance on the Mike Huckabee radio show Tuesday afternoon, and clarified his claims that women who face “legitimate rape” cannot become pregnant.
Arguing that he misplaced the word “legitimate,” Akin explained — during a follow up interview with Dana Loesch — that he meant to argue that women sometimes lie about being raped:
AKIN: You know, Dr. Willke has just released a statement and part of his letter, I think he just stated it very clearly. He said, of course Akin never used the word legitimate to refer to the rapist, but to false claims like those made in Roe v. Wade and I think that simplifies it….. There isn’t any legitimate rapist…. [I was] making the point that there were people who use false claims, like those that basically created Roe v. Wade.
Since he first made the comments over the weekend, Akin claimed that he meant to say “forcible,” rather than “legitimate” rape.
And while many Republicans are distancing themselves from the candidate, staunch anti-choice conservatives are backing-up Akin’s explanation. Dr. John Willke, who describes himself as the “founding father” of the movement, issued a statement defending Akin and Huckabee approvingly read it during his interview on Tuesday.
Willke “is a leading proponent of the view that women are unlikely to become pregnant by ‘forcible rape,’ a theory he laid out in a 1999 article on the subject.”
source: http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2
Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) announced that he will continue with his race for the U.S. Senate, during an appearance on the Mike Huckabee radio show Tuesday afternoon, and clarified his claims that women who face “legitimate rape” cannot become pregnant.
Arguing that he misplaced the word “legitimate,” Akin explained — during a follow up interview with Dana Loesch — that he meant to argue that women sometimes lie about being raped:
AKIN: You know, Dr. Willke has just released a statement and part of his letter, I think he just stated it very clearly. He said, of course Akin never used the word legitimate to refer to the rapist, but to false claims like those made in Roe v. Wade and I think that simplifies it….. There isn’t any legitimate rapist…. [I was] making the point that there were people who use false claims, like those that basically created Roe v. Wade.
Since he first made the comments over the weekend, Akin claimed that he meant to say “forcible,” rather than “legitimate” rape.
And while many Republicans are distancing themselves from the candidate, staunch anti-choice conservatives are backing-up Akin’s explanation. Dr. John Willke, who describes himself as the “founding father” of the movement, issued a statement defending Akin and Huckabee approvingly read it during his interview on Tuesday.
Willke “is a leading proponent of the view that women are unlikely to become pregnant by ‘forcible rape,’ a theory he laid out in a 1999 article on the subject.”
source: http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2
Which is its own double-edged sword, allowing the defense to project onto her the motive of inventing the rape to access an abortion.
(Requirement of a court case would indeed take too long and require additional contortions with regard to jury selections: the prosecution would call for keeping the jury free of pro-lifers who might taint the verdict with their refusal to cast a guilty vote in any circumstances lest it justify an abortion, and the defense would take umbrage at a jury full of pro-choicers because we tend to have funny ideas about consent being mandatory for non-rape sexual encounters.)
The thing is, while this is absolutely true:
1.) This is not at all the mindset of the people who actually oppose these exemptions, which is evident in the way they display ABSOLUTELY NO SYMPATHY of even acknowledgement of the victims, and
2.) It's shitty, but when abortion rights are in the peril that there in right now, a fucked-up hypocritical exemption that protects some rape victims is better than no protections at all.