Decided to move this over here, even though it could just as easily have stayed in WTF or moved to the Election thread, since both of those are more likely to have crosstalk and since this really is about the abortion debate.
Anyhow, Doctorow, under the delightful headline
Whence springs Todd Akin's belief in magic, rape-proof vaginas?, links to
Justine Larbalestier (and Justine, if I butchered your name that's because you inexplicably made the title text of your blog an image so I can't just copy-paste it) who quotes Making Sex by Thomas Laqueur:
Samuel Farr, in the first legal-medicine text to be written in English (1785), argued that “without an excitation of lust, or enjoyment in the venereal act, no conception can probably take place.” Whatever a woman might claim to have felt or whatever resistance she might have put up, conception in itself betrayed desire or at least a sufficient measure of acquiescence for her to enjoy the venereal act. This is a very old argument. Soranus had said in second-century Rome that “if some women who were forced to have intercourse conceived . . . the emotion of sexual appetite existed in them too, but was obscured by mental resolve,” and no one before the second half of the eighteenth century or early nineteenth century question the physiological basis of this judgement. The 1756 edition of Burn’s Justice of the Peace, the standard guide for English magistrates, cites authorities back to the Institutes of Justinian to the effect that “a woman can not conceive unless she doth consent.” It does, however, go on to point out that as matter of law, if not of biology, this doctrine is dubious. Another writer argued that pregnancy ought to be taken as proof of acquiescence since the fear, terror, and aversion that accompany a true rape would prevent an orgasm from occurring and thus make conception unlikely.
So, you know, gross-ass eighteenth-century pseudo-science claiming that if a woman's pregnant she must not have been raped. (Also, she's probably a witch.)
It puts me in mind of what Constantine was saying the other day about how the fundamentalists try to shift the debate to something that doesn't actually matter -- if we're actually HAVING a debate about whether a woman trying to get an abortion was really raped or is just making that up, then yes we've already lost because we're acting as if that matters.
But, thing is, there's no debate. Because when someone even brings up that question in public, the backlash is immediate and harsh, as we're seeing here.
I think this is another case of the religious right spending too much time preaching to the choir and wildly misunderstanding what mainstream opinion actually is.
I'm grateful to Akin for actually saying this shit out loud. A whole lot of Republicans have learned to temper their anti-choice rhetoric and slowly whittle away abortion rights using ginned-up nonsense like "partial-birth abortion". Akin has come out and said what fundamentalists actually believe, which is misogyny with a distinct anti-science aftertaste.
As I said recently, this is a mainstream view in the Republican Party; it may not be a majority but it's a very loud and powerful faction. And it's pretty abhorrent to most of America.
I'm not quite as ready to write Akin's political obit as Shinra is, though. I think this will probably sink him -- it IS the top story on Google News today, and his own party seems pretty unhappy with him -- but it's not a sure thing.
EDIT to add:
Akin apologized Monday for what he called a serious error in using the wrong words when he stated in an earlier interview that "legitimate rape" rarely resulted in pregnancy.
"I was talking about forcible rape," Akin said on former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's radio show. "It was absolutely the wrong word."
Appearing on former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's radio show, Akin said rape is "never legitimate."
"It's an evil act. It's committed by violent predators," Akin said. "I used the wrong words the wrong way."
So uh he seems to think the problem is that people thought "legitimate rape" meant he believed that there were occasions that rape was "legitimate" as in "acceptable"? As opposed to, you know, all the stuff that's ACTUALLY wrong with what he said?
Not sure if invoking strawman or sincerely has no idea what was wrong with what he said.
