Memo to Rep. Todd Akin: Rape Is Rape

By now everyone in possession of a computer keyboard or a lapel mike has had a chance to weigh in on Rep. Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment.

It was “disgusting” and “sickening” and “deeply offensive.” It was “ignorant” and “abhorrent” and “profoundly wrong.”

All true.

Akin, a Missouri Republican who is challenging Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill in the Missouri Senate race, said a stupid and insensitive thing and he deserves the indignation raining down on him.

But as the whipping boy in this election year, he’s getting a flogging for comments that aren’t all that different from a lot of the rhetoric that gets hauled out by abortion opponents every time the “rape exception” is on the table.

Akin was defending his opposition to abortion even in the case of pregnancy resulting from rape when he made this comment during a televised debate: “It seems to me first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Akin is also being taken to task for perpetuating the dumb idea that we ladies control our baby-making equipment with our flighty emotional minds, allowing us “to shut that whole thing down” whenever we choose.

But he was only summarizing the theory of physician John C. Willke, a former president of the National Right to Life Committee, who believes that emotional trauma interrupts egg fertilization during unwanted sexual intercourse.

Willke explained his long-held theory to The New York Times earlier this week in the wake of the Akin controversy. “This is a traumatic thing – she’s, shall we say, she’s uptight. She is frightened, tight, and so on. And sperm, if deposited in her vagina, are less likely to be able to fertilize. The tubes are spastic.”

But it wasn’t the nutty idea that a woman can exert mind control over her cervix and fallopian tubes that set off the ruckus. It was his use of the term “legitimate rape.”

In an interview with one-time Republican presidential candidate and radio host Mike Huckabee, Akin apologized and corrected himself. “I was talking about forcible rape, and it was absolutely the wrong word,” he said.

“Forcible rape,” along with “assault rape,” is a loaded, coded term used by people who mistrust women to understand when their bodies are being violated and to honestly report when they’ve been assaulted. It is trotted out in the argument about whether exceptions for rape should be included in anti-abortion platforms.

There is a distinction between rape and statutory rape, the crime of having consensual sex with a minor. Referring to nonstatutory rape as “forcible rape” or “assault rape” perpetuates one of the most insidious and dangerous anti-female canards – that only some rapes are legitimate, that no sometimes means yes and that women “ask for it” and then “cry rape.”

It’s all good summer fun to pile on to the anti-Akin bandwagon. He stepped in it, he looks like a kook and he may well pay for his comment with a loss on election night.

The ease with which he corrected himself for using one loaded word by using another should be the issue of the day and the one that will carry forward long after November.

Rape is rape. If you believe it’s a crime of violence, not an excuse women trot out when they get pregnant and want an abortion, it doesn’t require any modifier.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal