The Mathematics of 'Legitimate Rape' and Pregnancy

Hugh Pickens writes "James Hamblin, MD writes in the Atlantic that it's unclear how common the misconception that women rarely become pregnant after rape may be, but remarks by Missouri Senatorial nominee Todd Akin that 'if it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down' (video) may provide some benefit as a learning opportunity. 'From a holistic perspective, one might hypothesize that a woman's body could respond to the extreme stress and trauma of enduring rape in such a way that she would be physiologically more likely to miscarry (or not to conceive at all),' writes Hamblin. After all there is a multi-million dollar alternative reproductive health market aimed at optimizing an environment for conception so there could be something to a theory that the other, much darker end of that spectrum functions analogously. But that hypothesis doesn't hold, to any relevant degree. A widely-cited 1996 study from the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology sampled over 4,000 women and found that the rape-related pregnancy rate was 5.0 percent and studies from other countries have reported the percentage to be even greater."

Comments

Re:There are no Facts

[cpu6502]

>>>It's not punishment. It is a medical procedure. Furthermore, it is a medical procedure being performed on someone who is not you, therefore you have no say in the matter.

By that logic an American living in 1800 should be able to kill her slave.

After all it's just a "medical procedure" and since it's "not you" therefore you have no say in the matter. And yes I do consider the killing of human fetuses roughly equivalent to the killing of human slaves (it's the termination of a human organism, regardless of his or her age).