The raped escape
The rape if it’s a rape!
I think she’s got it…
The raped escape
The rape if it’s a rape!
I think she’s got it…
So if the rape’s legit …
That’s just it!
That’s just it!
You shut the naughty bits!
No shit!
No shit!
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“There are ways of telling if she’s been legitimately raped!“
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[M]y view is that insensitive comments concerning rape are especially likely to be deemed inexcusable by voters, and that the swing against Mr. Akin could be larger than the average of 10 percentage points from similar events.
The New York Times’ Nate Silver gives UD hope that a man this stupid will not defile the United States Senate.
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Strategic Uterine Defense Initiative.
Plus, they make the best potatoes.
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A British historian of science returns to medieval times to help the British understand the mind of one of America’s candidates for the Senate.
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Missouri: The Show Me Your Uterus State.
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Republicans Going After the Ute Vote
August 20th, 2012 at 6:37AM
Yet again, something so absurd (yet true) that it really should be something from The Onion.
August 20th, 2012 at 10:03AM
I suspect the poor man got confused when studying the thought of revered feminist professor Mary Daly about parthenogenesis.
August 20th, 2012 at 10:08AM
Akin’s comments do reveal an interesting tension at the heart of the pro-life argument, however. After all, if you do literally believe that personhood begins at conception – that a fetus has exactly the same moral and legal standing as a postpartum child – then there shouldn’t be any circumstances in which abortion is allowable, no matter how ‘hard’ or horrible. Akin is a dickwad, but at least there is a certain amount of logical consistency to what he’s claiming. It’s the folks who espouse fetal personhood but throw in a rape-and-incest exception who are espousing the most patent nonsense.
August 20th, 2012 at 12:22PM
Alan: You’re right.
August 20th, 2012 at 12:22PM
tp: Yes, I’m sure Akin’s well-read in feminism.
August 20th, 2012 at 3:34PM
Thanks for the Heggie link. Most illuminating. The reasoning does make a certain amount of sense — but only if you think of women’s genitalia as men’s turned inside out, and ignore a century or so’s understanding of women’s hormonal cycles (I wonder how theories that assumed the ejaculation of a female seed on orgasm dealt with the cyclical nature of women’s fertility, which I suspect has been recognized for some time, if only due to analogies in the animal kingdom, and the rather obvious fact of menstruation, and its connection to pregnancy).
And yes, if fertilized eggs are full human beings, then abortion is murder no matter how the pregnancy occurred. One then needs to figure out what the fact that, in the normal course of things, 30%+ of those human beings never implant and grow means. Or how to think about pregnancies where the fertilized egg divides further but does not differentiate, resulting in something more like a cancer than a baby (I’ve forgotten the technical term, but this exists). Or what to do about ectopic pregnancies (which is probably getting back into similar territory as pregnancies due to rape or incest).
These issues do not lend themselves to easy answers — which just might be an argument for letting individual women make their own decisions about their own situations with whatever help they deem necessary from medical professionals, other scientists, and/or clergy/theologians.