Rep. Trent Franks
I don’t understand why repugicans continue to offer up headlines like “repugican congressman: Rate of pregnancies from rape is ‘very low.’
” It is terrible politics for them to focus the public’s attention on
their justification for the fact that they don’t support an exception to
abortion bans for rape victims. The view doesn’t have anything like majority support,
and they come off as heartless, ignorant scolds. If I were an
anti-abortion activist, I’d want to muzzle these people. But they are
irrepressible. At a congressional hearing Wednesday, Rep. Trent Franks, a
repugican from Arizona, argued against an exception for rape and
incest victims from a ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. He
said, “Before, when my friends on the left side of the aisle here tried
to make rape and incest the subject—because, you know, the incidence of
rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.” He is of course following in
the footsteps of former Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri, who said that women
can stave off pregnancy after a “legitimate rape.” (He apologized but that didn’t save him from losing his next election.)
These claims are false, of course, or as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists puts it, “medically inaccurate, offensive, and dangerous.” That is not all that’s wrong with the claims. They originate with Nazi experiments on women in concentration camps. Here’s what I wrote about this last November
“In the aftermath of Akin’s statement, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on a 1972 essay by
an obstetrician named Fred Mecklenburg, who cited a Nazi experiment in
which women were told they were on their way to die in the gas
chambers—and then were allowed to live, so that doctors could check
whether they would still ovulate. Since few did, Mecklenburg claimed
that women exposed to the emotional trauma of rape wouldn’t be able to
become pregnant, either. (He also argued that rapists are infertile
because they masturbate a lot.) The essay was published in a book
financed by A.U.L.”
A.U.L. is Americans United for Life, a pro-life advocacy group with increasing clout because of its success in drafting model state laws to restrict abortion.
The line from the Nazis to Mecklenburg to Akin and Franks runs through
Jack Wilke, a doctor who is the former head of the National Right to
Life Committee. He said, "What is certainly one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant, and that's physical trauma." And he stuck with this when the Los Angeles Times called to ask him about Akin
last year. When I asked A.U.L. head Charmaine Yoest about the claim
that rape rarely results in pregnancy, she was smarter and called it “a
distraction.” Abortion opponents sure do keep bringing it up, though.
***
Since repugicans are Nazis it falls to reason they'd use their own 'research' now wouldn't it!?
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