Todd Akin Is a Jerk, But Not an Outlier

Todd Akin’s crime: saying what too many in the GOP really think. (Photo via The Week)

The GOP doesn’t like the intimation, originally made by Democrats last spring when Republicans howled about insurers being forced to cover contraception and Rush Limbaugh infamously applied the “slut” label to a Georgetown grad student, that it is waging a “war on women.” To be fair, conservatives have a point; it’s more accurate to say the GOP is waging a war only on women who value autonomy, reproductive rights and the hard-won victories of 20th-century feminism. Considering half the country votes Republican, perhaps that eliminates a lot of American women. But every time an aggrieved conservative like Kathryn Jean Lopez, the uber-Catholic writer at National Review, attempts to make the argument that “much of this ‘war on women’ rhetoric is a cynical scare tactic to ensure that single women vote Democrat this November,” some Republican Neanderthal comes along and knocks the entire debate back to the 1950s. The most recent Exhibit A: U.S. Rep. Todd Akin, the candidate challenging Claire McCaskill for her Missouri Senate seat, who stirred up controversy on both sides of the aisle when he tried to explain why he opposes abortion in all cases, without exceptions for rape or incest. Pregnancy, according to Akin, hardly ever happens unless a woman is, you know, faking a rape:

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. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. You know, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

To their credit, prominent Republicans — including Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell and Scott Brown — denounced the remarks, though Akin’s ill-advised monologue differed more from the Republican party line in its impolitic rhetoric (and its junk science) than in its substance. How shocked, just shocked could conservative luminaries possibly be when Akin’s hard-line position on abortion and invocation of “legitimate” rapes is a mere finger’s breadth away from the beliefs of the Republican vice-presidential nominee? As Margaret Carlson writes at Bloomberg View, “The difference between Ryan’s views and Akin’s could fit on a Post-it note.”

Paul Ryan, with his 100% rating from the National Right to Life Committee, also opposes abortion without exceptions for rape, incest, or the woman’s health. (He would permit it only in “cases in which a doctor deems an abortion necessary to save the mother’s life.”) When Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels proposed a “truce” on social issues, Ryan fired back, saying, “I’m as pro-life as a person gets. You’re not going to have a truce.” Ryan is as good as his word; in the House, he and Akin were co-sponsors of the Sanctity of Human Life Act, a lovely little piece of “personhood” legislation that would have defined humanity as beginning at conception, when the sperm meets the egg, and given embryos the “all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.” The law would not only have allowed states to criminalize abortion, but would have potentially enabled them to ban the morning-after pill (on the scientifically dubious grounds that it could prevent a fertilized embryo from implanting in the uterus) and in vitro fertilization (the procedure that produced one of Mitt Romney’s grandsons). In 2010, Ryan penned an essay titled “The Cause of Life Can’t Be Severed From the Cause of Freedom,” and Daily Beast writer Michelle Goldberg has this to say about the veep candidate’s cri de coeur: “For anyone who wants to know how Ryan thinks, that essay is worth reading. It’s about 1,500 words long, but the word “woman” doesn’t appear in it once.”

Ryan has also dabbled in the same “legitimacy” canard that Akin has been so roundly condemned for bringing up. He and Akin were among the 173 co-sponsors of last year’s No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, a another piece of legislation that passed the House — where it won the vote of every Republican representative, plus 16 Democrats — but died in the Senate. One proposed section of this subtly-named law would have added the word “forcible” to the rape exemption to the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funds from being used for abortions. Currently, Medicaid pays for abortion if a woman has been raped or is the victim of incest; the NFTA Act would have narrowed the exception to “forcible rape” — what Akin later told radio host Mike Huckabee that he meant by “legitimate rape” — a term almost Orwellian in its redundancy. (In actuality, Medicaid rarely ends up paying for abortions; Dylan Matthews writes at the Post that state-level restrictions and complex reimbursement requirements mean that, of women covered by the rape-and-incest exemptions, “only 37 percent of women ended up getting eligible abortions funded by Medicaid. As a consequence, a quarter of women on Medicaid who planned on getting an abortion and were eligible under the Hyde amendment ended up giving birth instead, according to a study by the Guttmacher Institute.” Most states require a doctor to certify that the woman has been raped, but 11 states force women to submit a police report to include in the Medicaid claim. NFTA attempted to further reduce the number of eligible abortions. When the legislation was under consideration in the House, Mother Jones reported:

For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion. Other types of rapes that would no longer be covered by the exemption include rapes in which the woman was drugged or given excessive amounts of alcohol, rapes of women with limited mental capacity, and many date rapes.

Why did the future VP nominee feel compelled to define rape down? Because, in the words of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Associate Director of Pro-Life Activities (try putting that one on a resume), the change in language was “an effort on the part of the sponsors to prevent the opening of a very broad loophole for federally funded abortions for any teenager.” Back to Mother Jones:

Pro-life advocates believed they needed to include the word “forcible” in the law to preempt what National Right to Life Committee lobbyist Doug Johnson called a “brazen” effort by Planned Parenthood and other groups to obtain federal funding for abortions for any teenager by (falsely) claiming statutory rape. Abortion rights groups, Johnson warned, wanted to “federally fund the abortion of tens of thousands of healthy babies of healthy moms, based solely on the age of their mothers.”

The “forcible” language was removed after it sparked an uproar, but the Republican party has a history of looking to classify and demonize “unworthy” rape victims. In March, the sponsor of a bill in the Idaho state legislature that would have required all women to view an ultrasound before an abortion, state Sen. Chuck Winder argued that no exceptions should be made for rape victims:

Rape and incest was used as a reason to oppose this. I would hope that when a woman goes in to a physician with a rape issue, that physician will indeed ask her about perhaps her marriage, was this pregnancy caused by normal relations in a marriage or was it truly caused by a rape.

Ladies: before seeking to abort the child of your attacker, please make sure you have actually been raped. Sen. Winder understands this can be confusing; maybe it’s best that you not worry your pretty little head about abortion in general.

The canard that rape cannot cause pregnancy also has a long history on the right, albeit on the pro-life fringe of the right. Most of the so-called “evidence” is drawn from a 1999 article by physician John C. Willke, a former president of the National Right to Life Committee, that the “emotional trauma” caused by “assault rape” (but not, apparently by the lesser forms of rape) can disrupt hormones that “radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, implantation and even nurturing of a pregnancy. So what further percentage reduction in pregnancy will this cause? No one knows, but this factor certainly cuts this last figure by at least 50 percent and probably more.” As Dave Weigel of Slate snarks, “Pro tip: If your medical argument includes the phrase “no one knows, but…” then you might want to head back to the crime lab.” Lest you think that Willke’s article is a relic of the benighted 20th century, be aware that it’s currently reprinted on the website for Christian Life Resources, and was referenced just yesterday by Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association (who has made more news lately for his virulently homophobic views than his positions on abortion), who linked to the article in a tweet that read, “Todd Akin is right: physical trauma of forcible rape can interfere w/ hormonal production, conception.” The New Republic’s website has a run-down of some of the conservative politicians who have made similar statements, including North Carolina state Rep. Henry Aldridge’s 1995 contention that “the facts show that people who are raped — who are truly raped — the juices don’t flow, the body functions don’t work and they don’t get pregnant.”

Again, there’s that “truly raped” language. For all the hubbub over Akin’s use of the term “legitimate,” he’s hardly the first knuckle-dragger to do so.

More mainstream Republicans whine, not without reason, that they are unfairly being tarred with the beliefs of their party’s radical fringe. (Though Red State’s Eric Erickson, who is mainstream enough to do commentary for CNN, did make the pretty fringe-y accusation that President Obama supports infanticide, when he wrote that “I’ll take Todd Akin’s inarticulate remarks over an infanticide supporter any day of the week.”)But apart his scientific illiteracy, Akin is squarely within the mainstream of conservative thought. Exceptions for rape and incest may come off as compassionate, but most pro-lifers oppose them — and for this they at least gets points for intellectual consistency. If you think that “Blastocyst Americans,” as Think Progress sarcastically refers to the fertilized embryos given Constitutional rights under “personhood” legislation, are real people, then it’s wrong to kill people, no matter how they were conceived. William Saletan of Slate notes that Republicans copacetic with exceptions tend to pin the issue on responsibility; a woman pregnant by rape should not be made to suffer for actions she didn’t commit, while women who choose to have sex should pay the price — er, take personal responsibility. No word on why pro-lifers think a woman willing to kill her unborn child to avoid personal responsibility would make a good mother. The idea that children conceived by rape should not be “punished” for the crime is firmly entrenched in the Republican establishment; today, under the subhead of “Let’s not double down on violence and pain,” National Review ran a sampling of reactions by conservative thought leaders to the Akin flap. Serrin Foster, executive director of Feminists for Life, said: “When someone asks about abortion exceptions for rape and incest, we must also consider the feelings of those who were conceived through sexual assault.” A member of the state Republican central committee backed Akin’s argument that few rapes cause pregnancy, telling the Times that “at that point, if God has chosen to bless this person with a life, you don’t kill it.”

Yes. Consider the feelings of the fetus, please. Or, as Paul Ryan’s favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, would have said, Consider the feelings of the “piece of protoplasm.” (While Ryan continues to enthusiastically embrace Galt-style economics, he has disavowed Rand’s atheism and, presumably, her conviction that “abortion is a moral right” and her dismissal of embryonic personhood as “vicious nonsense.”)

The righteous outrage on the part of conservatives only masks the true depths of the Republican threat to women’s rights (and yes, I do count abortion as part of “women’s rights.”) While Romney issued a statement claiming that “Gov. Romney and Cong. Ryan disagree with Mr. Akin’s statement, and a Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape a Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape,” the campaign later confirmed that Ryan’s personal views differ. The Republican candidate for Montana Senate, Denny Rehberg, put his piety on display by giving away a $5,000 contribution he received from Akin’s PAC — to a “crisis pregnancy center,” of all places. Such centers, many of which don’t even have a medical professional on staff, are thinly-disguised pro-life organizations designed to encourage “alternatives” to abortion by demonizing Planned Parenthood and peddling discredited myths about links between abortion and suicide or breast cancer. Crisis pregnancy centers, which advertise themselves as neutral clinics but which push women to keep their pregnancies in all cases, would find little to disagree with in Akin’s rejection of exemptions for rape — and might very well be promoting similar junk science about pregnancy-preventing “rape hormones.”

Akin has apologized for using “the wrong words in the wrong way” but hasn’t backed off his opposition to exemptions for rape or incest. Vowing to stay in the race, he characterizes the GOP response as “a little bit of an overreaction,” and on this point I am inclined to agree with him. It’s hard not to be cynical about remarks like these from Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, a Tea Party favorite: “Todd Akin’s statements are reprehensible and inexcusable. He should step aside today for the good of the nation.” Evidently, it’s “inexcusable” to expose the nasty side of Republican extremism; yet today, as party bigwigs meet in Tampa to develop the 2012 platform, CNN reports that “The Republican Party is once again set to enshrine into its official platform support for ‘a human life amendment’ to the Constitution that would outlaw abortion without making explicit exemptions for rape or incest.” This stance is nothing new; the platform has included similar language since 1976, and the current elocution is unchanged from the 2004 and 2008 cycles:

Faithful to the “self-evident” truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.

The DNC has already blasted out fundraising e-mails dubbing such language the “Akin plank” — and it’s well within its rights to do so. A separate e-mail characterized the Republican position as “trying to take women back to the dark ages” and proclaimed that “Akin’s choice of words isn’t the real issue here. The real issue is a Republican party — led by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan — whose policies on women and their health are dangerously wrong.” Strong language, but this is an issue that deserves strong language. If conservatives are content to label Democrats “baby-killers” and accuse the president of promoting infanticide, they shouldn’t be surprised when liberals strike back with references to the dark ages. When Sen. Johnson suggests that Akin should quit the race “for the good of the nation,” he gets it precisely backwards: If anything, Akin’s candidacy is good for the national dialogue, as it pulls back the curtain on the GOP’s views of women and highlights the party’s staunch opposition to reproductive rights. “Polls show Americans broadly oppose a constitutional amendment banning abortion,” the Washington Post reports, and over 75 percent of Americans believe exceptions should be made for rape and incest. If mainstream candidates like Mitt Romney are going to embrace people like Bryan Fischer and Eric Erickson — and if they are unwilling to denounce even Rush Limbaugh’s “slut” remarks in terms harsher than “not the words I would have used” — then they should be held accountable to the electorate. It presents a sharp contrast with President Obama, who said yesterday that “rape is rape” and that “what I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health-care decisions on behalf of women.” Amen.

I have no illusions that voters will suddenly rise up and toss abortion opponents out of office. In fact, polls also show that a strong majority of Americans approve of restrictions on abortion; the right has succeeded in smearing “abortion on demand” as a femi-Nazi plot. The latest PPP poll out of Missouri shows Akin still beating McCaskill by the narrowest of margins, though it’s unclear how many of the respondents were aware of the latest controversy. But as Eliot Spitzer, who knows a thing about bouncing back from controversy, writes at his Slate blog:

We should not be fooled that Akin’s statement, merely because it is so offensive and quickly retracted or clarified, is a mere slip. It actually represents the worldview of Akin and many like-minded Republican colleagues. His comments are part and parcel of a view of civil rights, women’s rights, and science that should be antithetical to a modern society.

Akin, in refusing to drop out of the race, tells Mike Huckabee that “I’m not a quitter . . . . To quote my old friend John Paul Jones, ‘I’ve not yet begun to fight.’” Pro-choicers should take a similar attitude. This is not a battle we can afford to “quit,” and it’s not a fight we can afford to lose.