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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."
the disturbing trend which gives rise to it is a serious problem politically, but more important, socially.
Its a disturbing religious problem too. Look at the point of view of a brainwashed cult member when someone does something that their whacked out belief system doesn't like, in this example, abortion. Well, god certainly isn't going to punish her because there is none, this evidence creates huge cognitive dissonance issues for the cult members. And society is not going to punish her because outside of the cult no one cares, although the cult likes to tell itself everyone is a member, which makes huge cognitive dissonance issues for the cult members. So... abandoned by god and abandoned by society, how is a cult with some remaining political power supposed to react... Ah I know, use the law to enforce religious beliefs, so everyone, including the people outside the cult, have to live like cult members. That's the religious crisis, the religion is dying by becoming less relevant. Thus the desperate grasping at straws to legislate their twisted morality onto everyone else.... "You may not believe, you may not care about us, but dammit men with guns and judges in robes will force you to live like us, like it or not !!!" Its a classic symptom of a dying religion.
See, a living, stable, maybe growing religion would not feel pressured to lash out. And frankly I as long as its consenting adults, etc, I don't care what crazyness cult members do to each other. As long as they leave the sane people, the non-members, the non-believers, alone... but no, they're terrified of their cults mortality so they lash out at the rights of everyone else.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
A lot of people in the press have been playing fast and loose with Paul Ryan's connection to all this (largely for the flimsy reason that they were both cosponsors of the person-hood amendment), so I don't know what GP had in mind. But this much is worth reflecting on: Paul Ryan and Todd Akin also cosponsored a bill that would allow medicaid only to spend money for abortion services for women who were victims of "forcible rape" (instead of just "rape," which is how the law reads now). We might well have wondered why in the world Ryan and Akin thought that distinction was important. We still don't know about Ryan, but the evidence now seems to indicate that, for Akin, the answer may be that only "forcible" rapes are "legitimate." This, IMHO, is a repugnant view and we should be probably inquire to make sure that the GOPs VP nominee doesn't believe it too.
caritj.org
Something that *never* gets brought up (and ignored in discussions when I bring it up) is this fact: my genetics prof. when I was a freshman in college pointed out that if you believe that conception starts at fertilization then about 3/4 of the people conceived never are even born. This is because of the body's spontaneous abort mechanism that ceases pregnancies that have genetic problems.
I wonder if Akin confused this with his idea that rape victims spontaneously abort. (Given Akin's lack of intelligence this is probably given him too much credit).
Of course this idea sets a lot of the anti-abortion arguments on it's ear, since if you believe it then hell is filled with unbabtised babies.
The senator's statements imply that if a women were to get pregnant in the case of rape it was not a "legitimate" or "real" rape.
I'm totally not on Akin's side of this, but I do believe his words have been widely misunderstood. The way he said it, I took "legitimate rape" to mean "against their will, under duress, stress-inducing, back-alley rape." The other kind of rape would include statutory rape and possibly other forms that, while legally considered rape, don't create the physical and emotional response in women that "legitimate rape" would.
I also think this is a problem with the statistics referenced in the article. I would like to see the rate of pregnancy resulting from sex-under-duress, instead of the rate of pregnancy resulting from sex-that-is-legally-considered-rape, because google tells me that the former would indeed likely be lower.
Akin's comments were tasteless and ignorant of current knowledge/data, but since no one else is coming to his defense, I will.
There are two aspects of his comments to which people take offense. To get the first out of the way quickly, "legitimate rape", the 2004 Maryland case of "delayed withdrawal of consent" is an example of "rape" that is not "legitimate".
Now, onto the pregnancy statistics. The theory that rape resulted in few pregnancies was common among conservatives, as TFA states. It came from the amlgamation of two scientific reports. First, studies have shown that female orgasm increases fertility because the vagina draws the sperm up like a conveyer belt as well as opens up the cervix. Second, until just a couple of years ago, rape victims reported orgasms in only 5-20% of cases. A recent study, however, showed that up to 90% of rape victims orgasm -- including those who could not otherwise normally orgasm. Women in previous studies were too ashamed to admit it (and in fact it's the greater psychological trauma than from having been penetrated).
This is an explanation for what was reported only in 2003, which is that the chance of pregnancy is greater with rape than with consensual.
Akin's information was out of date, was widely accepted by anti-abortion advocates (esp in the past), and had some scientific basis that was skewed due to rape victims' misreporting.
I wasn't logged in, but to repeat my question (which is sincere—I'm trying to understand the science, not defend Akin's claims):
I'm confused about the numbers in the paper's abstract. They say the pregnancy rate is 5%, and the number of resulting pregnancies annually in the U.S. is 32,000. That means the number of incidents of rape is 640,000.
Other sources claim the number of reported rapes in the U.S. is around 90,000. How do we reconcile these numbers? Surely the authors don't claim that 86% of rapes in the U.S. go unreported?
There is a famous argument by Judith Jarvis Thomson that suggests that even GRANTING that a fetus is a full-fledged person with the same rights as everyone else, that STILL they do not have the right to infringe on the rights of the mother:
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.
Do you have a moral obligation to spend nine months hooked up to this person to keep them alive because you were selected to loan out your kidneys by a third party?
IMHO statutory rape shouldn't exist at an age 18 threshold.
If we're going to argue immaturity while the persons body is well capable of the act then the brain doesn't finish maturing until 25.
Additionally it might slow down this rash of two under 18 parents with a kid all of a sudden.
The age should be lowered to 16 at the very least, and Canadas law of 14 made the most sense.
The instances of an under-14 year old girl going after sex in a bar somewhere and actually getting away with people thinking she's 18-19+ are extremely rare. The instances of a 14+ girl doing the same are extremely common. This is what the original law was based on. The 14+ year old is probably physically matured(they almost definitely are by 16), and is likely very curious about sex. There are a fair number of these girls that then go out and look for an older and (They presume) more experienced guy to introduce them to it, often lying about how old they are in the process. The guy doesn't even always find out how old she was.
Most guys in Canada follow the under 18 guidelines anyways as a general rule, however I know more than one that's been hit with a 15 or 16 year old that looked way fucking older. Now you have to I.D. them before you can let them on for a ride.
From the other side I know at least two girls I went to high school with that did exactly what I described. This was out of a class of 32, so percentages of girls doing this are actually significant, though this is somewhat anecdotal as it is a small sample size, I wouldn't be surprised to find similar throughout north america.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be some form of punishment, but 14-18 non-forcible sex should be a much more minor offense of some sort, with under-14 being the auto-rape.
The concept of a human, say vs. a lump of human cells (please read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, it's pretty interesting) usually includes the concept of consciousness, which for most babies doesn't occur at birth. Obviously a baby is alive, and has feelings and such, but consciousness as humans understand it doesn't appear to exist. A very interesting possibility is that consciousness is thinking, and you need language to think. There was a RadioLab Episode where they interviewed deaf people after they learned Sign Language, and they claimed an altered consciousness before they knew language, as if it was a void before.
That said, my wife has a very good friend who claims to have memories in utero, and of her own birth. I have no reason to doubt her. So there are at least a few counterarguments to the GP claim.
The debate is actually over whether it's a harmful medical procedure performed on the fetus. Basically one group sees the woman as a caregiver who has by her actions taken over care of another individual currently incapacitated from caring for themselves, and doesn't believe a woman should be allowed to casually withdraw care given that it is 100% likely to lead to the death of said individual. The other group says if an individual hasn't been seen yet, it doesn't exist, and thus executing said individual is fine and not murder.
Both groups are really kind of strange. For example, the second group generally doesn't function as stated verbatim, but rather believes that at some arbitrary time the unseen individual is suddenly real (like, second, third trimester, a specific number of days into pregnancy), just a magic but arbitrary switch that has nothing to do with physical development; the other group believes the same thing, but the thing suddenly becomes an individual earlier. I don't believe newborn babies are any different than a fetus: they're blank and have no individuality, and a one-day-old is pretty worthless and not really a human being but just a collection of cells.
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What people remember and what they *think* they remember is not the same. Example:
There was a surgeon who got tired of hearing stories how patients escaped their bodies during surgery and hovered in the room during procedure. So he placed a large bright object on top of a tall cabinet, and every time this story came up he asked what was the bright object in the operating room. So far no answer.
Interestingly enough, there was recently a case that sorta dealt with the first situation: A 20-year-old woman slept with a 16-year-old Justin Bieber, committing statutory rape. A pregnancy ensued. She claimed paternity against Justin Bieber, but changed her mind and dropped the claim once she realized that to claim paternity would be to admit to her crime of rape.
As far as I know, this kind of situation hasn't actually been tested in court - the tough part is that it's probably in the best interests of the child to have dad's financial support, but at the same time it seems unfair to punish dad for being raped.
I am officially gone from
I have always been of the opinion that while Christian conservatives decry Islam as evil, they are secretly jealous of it. Afterall, Islam has permeated many governments in the Middle East to a degree which most Christian conservatives could only hope to achieve.
"I'm a humble person really,
I'm actually much greater than I think I am"
The other group says if an individual hasn't been seen yet, it doesn't exist, and thus executing said individual is fine and not murder.
This is something that a lot of pro-choicers have to tell themselves so they feel better about themselves. By any reasonable definition a fetus is a human being, all of the arguments to the contrary to hold water, IMHO. "It's just a collection of cells!", yeah, well, so are you. "It doesn't even have a brain yet!", well, neither does someone in a persistent vegetative state, but it's still considered murder to put a bullet in their head.
Now I happen to be pro-choice, I believe that the issue is one of balancing the rights of the Mother vs. the rights of the unborn child. I don't believe that soceity has a right to tell one person that they MUST do something to keep another person alive. The analogy that I like to make is organ donation -- can I be compelled to give you a kidney, blood, or bone marrow if I'm the only compatible donor and the alternative is your death? Of course not, my right to control my body is paramount. Likewise, I don't believe we have the right to tell a woman that she MUST carry a baby to term.
One can be pro-choice without rationizing their position with moral hair-splitting about the fetus not being a person.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I don't mind paying my share of it.
I don't mind paying my share of well-baby services, national parks, promotion of the Arts, space exploration, pregnancy care, taking care of people who have fallen upon hard times, etc, etc, etc.
I object far more to paying for weapons systems that are black holes of funding and deliver barely-functional weapons. I object to paying for wars that never should have been waged. I object to paying for subsidies that wind up going to already-highly-profitable corporations.
Oh, and I don't like welfare fraud, either.
But some 20 years ago, while hearing a far-right-wing co-worker rail about welfare while the Savings and Loan Scandal was ramping up, I realized something. In the Savings and Loan Scandle, rich people bilked ordinary people of billions, then managed to skate away scott-free. My tax dollars helped "fix the mess". Essentially I indirectly gave a bunch of my money to Neil Bush. (to name one, but there were others)
Since then I have come to believe that far more of my tax dollars go to people making more than me than go to people making less. I don't begrudge the downtrodden. Even if he's a lazy bum, and I don't believe most are, it's a small price to pay, to make sure that the truly deserving are covered.
By the way, you may never need pregnancy services. Do you have a wife or sister? What about your mother?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.