As a registered Abortion Rights Militant™, I can only sit out so many stupid comments and bad-policy debates involving the ninja body skills and the secrete secretions of women. Thus, I sigh and pick up the broadsword and head once more into the breach.
Current Missouri Representative and Senatorial candidate (and member of the House Science and Technology committee!) Todd Akin deserves every last bit of scorn, derision, and contempt heaped upon him. I see no reason to offer him the benefit of the “mispeak” doubt, not least because, as Garance Franke-Ruta pointed out, this particular kind of ignorance pie has been passed around at more than one pro-life party:
Arguments like his have cropped up again and again on the right over the past quarter century and the idea that trauma is a form of birth control continues to be promulgated by anti-abortion forces that seek to outlaw all abortions, even in cases of rape or incest. The push for a no-exceptions anti-abortion policy has for decades gone hand in hand with efforts to downplay the frequency with which rape- or incest-related pregnancies occur, and even to deny that they happen, at all. In other words, it’s not just Akin singing this tune.
This particular Abortion Rights Militant™ favors exactly the same number of laws for abortion as she does for any other surgery—which is to say, none—so it is unsurprising that I oppose any laws regulating abortion after rape. I understand why other pro-choice folk emphasize the need for options in case of rape—the idea that the state would take away a woman’s right to control her body after the right to control her own body was taken away by a criminal is horrifying—but it unfortunately it a) plays into the argument that completely innocent victims deserve to choose whether to continue a pregnancy, but dirty dirty sluts who want sex deserve punishment in the form of a baby (aka, a “gift”); and b) that maybe those completely innocent victims are, in fact, not so innocent and thus also should be punished with the gift-baby.
You can see both parts in play in Akin’s comments as well as in Franke-Ruta’s round-up of reactionaries: If women were really legitimately forcibly raped, they wouldn’t get pregnant; if they get pregnant, well, then, maybe they wanted it just a lil’ bit.
Loudly unsaid, of course, is that any woman who wants and has sex deserve to get whatever’s coming to ’em us—except, perhaps, orgasms.
Anyway, this vampire bit of “logic” is unlikely to collapse into dust no matter how many times it’s staked, so I’ll keep my weapons handy—all to defend, the Right, the True, and the Pleasurable.
AbsurdBeats 