Legitimate Rape

In a flash, three of my Facebook friends, one of whom formerly served as an official in the Obama Administration, posted links to a news story about Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO).  As I started to read the story, I thought it had to be from The Onion.  Most of the time I find The Onion funny, but sometimes its articles are a little too edgy for my taste, especially the ones that would be appalling if they were true.  This was clearly one of those.

But ... no!  Really?  It couldn't be.  No Member of Congress could possibly have said something that stupid!  I assure you, coming from me, that is a very powerful exclamation, because I have many times quoted Mark Twain's old chestnut. ("Suppose you were an idiot.  And suppose you were a Member of Congress.  But I repeat myself.")

Representative Akin said when a woman is raped, her reproductive organs possess a sort of magic biological power that keeps the woman from getting pregnant.  And he used the phrase "legitimate rape."  Members of the viewing, listening, and reading audience immediately took that phrase out of context. Legitimate rape?  What is that?  How can a heinous violent crime be legitimate? What linguistic nonsense is this?  And what kind of an absolute moron believes this old wives' tale about female biology that went out with the Dark Ages?

It is unfortunate that the phrase was taken out of context.  Because placing it back in context is very revealing of the way some of the most misguided folks in the pro-life camp think.

To provide this context, I must ask you to imagine a nation without Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that invalidated many state abortion statutes as violating a woman's constitutional right to privacy.  (I have very definite opinions about Roe v. Wade, as I do about many of the Court's most controversial cases, but I'll save those for another essay.)  In the U.S. without Roe, the states are free to enact abortion laws that are very restrictive, as some of them did before 1973. A few on the pro-life side of the issue believe abortion is always wrong and should be illegal in every instance.  More common, though still held by a small minority, is the view that it should be legal only when continuing the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother.  Much more common is the inclusion of exceptions for rape or incest.

[As a sidebar, I should note that some who favor restrictive laws use the word "health" rather than "life" of the mother.  The objection to that lies in the expectation that "health" will include mental health, and one could argue that an unwanted pregnancy has at least the potential for threatening the mental health of any woman who is sufficiently distressed by the unwanted pregnancy.  Even were it restricted to physical health, there are plenty of obstetricians who specialize in high-risk pregnancies, and the risks they manage expertly are both maternal and fetal.]

So imagine that we did not have Roe, and states could enact laws restricting access to abortion to cases in which one (or more) of these three exceptions is present.  Some in the pro-life camp worry that women would claim they had been raped in order to gain access to a procedure otherwise denied them.

You are now free to venture off into a thought experiment in which you imagine a woman claiming that her unwanted pregnancy was the result of a rape and think about how that would go.  Would the system be set up simply to take her at her word?  Would she have to have sought medical attention as the victim of a violent assault?  Would she have to have filed a contemporaneous report with the police?  Would she be required to help the police identify and prosecute her assailant?  The way things are now, many women who are raped don't report the crime to the police because they've heard what a horrible ordeal may await them in the legal system.  Some, but not all, seek medical attention even if they don't want an evidence collection exam, so they can be given the "morning after pill" to reduce the chance of pregnancy and antibiotics for common sexually transmitted infections.  (Sadly, we don't have any way to keep them from coming down with HIV or hepatitis C.)

This notion of false reporting is what Akin was referring to when he spoke of "legitimate rape."

And that is where I found the most repulsive implication in what Akin said.  It involves a certain circular reasoning that includes a false premise.  If a woman was really raped (as opposed to just claiming she was raped because afterwards she had second thoughts and wanted to put her sexual partner through some legal torture, or because she had to say she was raped in order to get an abortion), she wouldn't get pregnant because of her body's automatic magical response (the false premise).  And so a woman who says her unwanted pregnancy resulted from rape is lying.

And where does that lead us?  Directly to a rationale for not including the rape exception in a severely restrictive abortion law.

This is a fundamentally flawed rationale, first because of the false premise, and second because of the inherent assumption that any woman would accuse a man of a terrible crime he didn't commit so as to gain access to a restricted medical procedure.

[Another sidebar: there is a sound rationale for not allowing the rape exception. One simply declares the question of abortion to be what it is, namely an ethical dilemma.  Like most ethical dilemmas, it is characterized by competing interests, in this instance the interest of the mother in controlling her own body versus the interest of the fetus in reaching viability and delivery.  One then declares his or her opinion that the interest of the fetus should be given priority - and that whether the act that led to conception was voluntary or not is irrelevant.  Of course, reasonable people may disagree over how any ethical dilemma should be resolved, and that is what we are doing now, because just about half of Americans think abortion laws should be more restrictive than they currently are, and the other half disagree.]

Before the Akin incident started me thinking (yet again) about all of these nettlesome issues, I looked at his conduct rather simply: as I said at the beginning of this essay, surely no Member of Congress could be that stupid.  My second thought: can it be legal for someone that stupid to be serving in Congress?

My third thought, and the one upon which I have settled as the answer to the whole mess, is this: I'm pretty sure the House of Representatives has no precedent for using astonishing, unconscionable, and reprehensible stupidity as a basis for censuring one of its members.  It is time to set that precedent.