"Legitimate rape" and Aikins' War on Women

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Grinning Cat on August 23, 2012 at 2:17am

Prof. Brooks is incisive and eloquent!

And thanks, Ruth, for the levity:

"It seems to me, first of all, from talking to Meteorologists, that if it's a legitimate hurricane the Republican Convention has ways to shut that whole thing down."

A perfect parody of Akin's 13th-century stupidity!

(And if it were true, the Republican Party would have been using weather control for the benefit of Big Agriculture long before the convention! :)

Permalink Reply by Ruth Anthony-Gardner on August 23, 2012 at 12:16pm

On further reflection Rob Brooks missed a lot by lightly dismissing "the largely irrelevant biology of whether women can, somehow, discriminate against the sperm of a rapist."

The notion that women are capable of shutting down a pregnancy if what happened to her was really rape resembles the logic of witch water tests. A woman with bound hands and feet was thrown into a body of water. If she drowned, that proved she was innocent of witchcraft. If she didn't drown that proved she was guilty, and deserved to be burned at the stake.

Pregnancy is the ultimate proof a rape victim has of her accusation. If she failed to get pregnant, she lacks this proof and it becomes he said/she said, so her claim is easily ignored. Pregnancy disproves the "I didn't have sex" defense and the "It was some other guy" defense, but - how convenient - to Aikins it proves she wasn't legitimately raped after all. It must have been consensual, so she's to blame.

Aikins ludicrous biology assertion isn't about biology at all, it signals a value system that justifies terrible persecution of women. The biology claim is like a patina concealing blatant evil, which would be easily recognized.

Permalink Reply by Steph S. on August 23, 2012 at 6:21pm

I hadn't thought of it that way Ruth - I was giving him too much credit for just being ignorant on biology - but I think he does have a hatred for women.

Misogyny in all it's forms.

Permalink Reply by Steph S. on August 23, 2012 at 6:22pm

I love the picture with "You can fix stupid" - that's great.

Permalink Reply by Steph S. on August 23, 2012 at 6:23pm

Thanks for that wonderful article - I'm going to follow the link and read it more thoroughly.

Permalink Reply by Ruth Anthony-Gardner on August 24, 2012 at 1:21pm

Republicans have been trying to redefine rape to exclude statutory rape.

Todd Akin, Paul Ryan, and Redefining Rape

Last year, Akin, vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and most of the House GOP cosponsored a bill that would have narrowed the already-narrow exceptions to the laws banning federal funding for abortion—from all cases of rape to cases of "forcible rape."

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." [emphasis mine]

So just because you're a pregnant 12 year old you shouldn't be entitled to get an abortion, statutory rape doesn't count.

 

Permalink Reply by Steph S. on August 24, 2012 at 9:12pm

That's scary!

Permalink Reply by Grinning Cat on August 25, 2012 at 12:29am

To the pro-lifers, an embryo has more rights than a living, breathing girl or woman.

Here's a paradigm I read about for asserting the right to abortion access, unaffected by any supposed "personhood" of the embryo: pregnancy causes such significant changes to a woman's body and liberty (with a 60% chance of complications requiring medical attention) that a pregnancy not consented to is a serious attack, and a woman has a right of self-defense against that attack. It doesn't matter whether the attacker is or is not a "person": you have the right to defend yourself if you're attacked by a man with a knife just as much as if you're attacked by a rabid dog.

Abortion Rights After South Dakota, Eileen McDonagh

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=e...