Lawmaker: Akin partly right on rape

— Two months after the issues of rape and abortion helped defeat two Republican Senate candidates, a veteran House Republican from Georgia reopened the subjects Friday, telling a group in suburban Atlanta that former Republican senatorial candidate Todd Akin of Missouri was “partially right” when he said that women do not become pregnant when raped.

Rep. Phil Gingrey, an obstetrician and gynecologist, told the Cobb County Chamber of Commerce that neither Akin, who lost his Senate bid to Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, nor Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who lost to Joe Donnelly, a Democrat, had been treated fairly in the wake of their rape comments, according to The Marietta Daily News.

“I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things,” Gingrey said, according to the paper. “It is true. We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right, wasn’t he?”

He went on: “But the fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you’re not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman’s body shutting anything down because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak. And yet the media took that and tore it apart.”

He also tried to justify Akin’s distinction between “legitimate rape” - which Akin had said women’s reproductive systems can defend against - and other unspecified sexual acts that can lead to pregnancy.

Akin, he said, “was asked by a local news source about rape and he said, ‘Look, in a legitimate rape situation’ - and what he meant by legitimate rape was just look, someone can say I was raped: A scared to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents, that’s pretty tough and might on some occasion say, ‘Hey, I was raped.’

“That’s what he meant when he said legitimate rape versus nonlegitimate rape. I don’t find anything so horrible about that. But then he went on and said that in a situation of rape, of a legitimate rape, a woman’s body has a way of shutting down so the pregnancy would not occur. He’s partly right on that.”

Front Section, Pages 7 on 01/12/2013

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