Saudi Cleric Pummeled On Twitter For Claiming Driving Damages Women's Ovaries

An anonymous reader writes "CNN reports, "Sheikh Saleh Al-Loheidan's widely derided remarks have gone viral ... 'If a woman drives a car,' Al-Loheidan told Saudi news website sabq.org. 'it could have a negative physiological impact. It would automatically affect a woman's ovaries and that it pushes the pelvis upward.' ... 'We find that for women who continuously drive cars, their children are born with varying degrees of clinical problems.' The controversial comments were widely interpreted throughout Saudi Arabia as an attempt to discourage women in the country from joining a popular online movement urging them to stage a demonstration by driving cars on October 26. 'This is his answer to the campaign,' Saudi women's rights activist Aziza Yousef told CNN. 'He's making a fool of himself. He shouldn't touch this field at all.' Al-Loheidan's words have been ridiculed mercilessly via social media. An Arabic Twitter hashtag called '#WomensDrivingAffectsOvariesAndPelvises' was quickly created to make fun of Al-Loheidan — underscoring just how widely the call for Saudi women to defy the driving ban has resonated thus far. And while numerous conservative voices have supported Al-Loheidan, many Saudis believe this was an extremely clumsy way of trying to counter the popularity of the October 26 campaign.'"

Comments

Re:It is true

[mark-t]

Not that Todd Akin was telling the truth, by any means, but in actuality, his statement is the result of a grossly ignorant misreading of what's really going on. I will, by the way, be assuming that by use of the word "legitimate" he was meaning something more like "genuine" and not meaning it as "acceptable" or "okay" (in the context that Akin appeared to use the term, "legitimate" rape would be where one of the two people did not want to have sex with the other at that time, where "illegitimate" rape might be, for example, copulation that may have been entirely voluntary at the time that it had occurred, but then afterwards one of the two decided that they didn't like it and convinces themselves that they never wanted it in the first place... which is not an altogether uncommon occurrence). It's worth noting that a lot of the outrage against Akin was caused by people who were taking the word "legitimate" in that context to mean some synonym of "acceptable", and it's quite natural that they should be offended by such a notion. Nonetheless, giving Akin the benefit of the doubt about the meaning of the terms, it's slightly less offensive to assume he meant "genuine", so that's what I'm doing here. To that end, it's worth noting that there is actually a grain of mathematical truth behind this claim... although lacking sufficient context, the statement is plainly outrageous.

The reason, you see, that it's really "rare" for a woman to get pregnant when she is raped is because rape, by itself, is already relatively rare compared to the frequency with which people voluntarily engage in copulative sex... at least in this society. Since pregnancy from rape demands what is already an atypical condition (involuntary sex as opposed to willful engaging of said activity), there is some "legitimate" mathematical basis for saying that pregnancy arising from rape is not common. Of course, ordinarily and without any such context to clarify what is being talked about, the statement sounds loaded, since it appears to presume the pre-occurrence of rape when assessing the frequency of pregnancy, and it's candidly obvious that Akin had absolutely no idea what he was even talking about.