Well this is embarrassing.
I thought the Todd Akins gaff about “legitimate rape” was an embarrassment largely because it acknowledged the occasional making of false accusations. One isn’t supposed to acknowledge the sometime mendacity of certified victims of patriarchy. All men are rotten bastards, period. “It takes incredible courage for a woman to come forward and report a rape.” And children always tell the truth about molestations, too; they’re not at all suggestible in the hands of experts.
The truth, though, could be far worse than political incorrectness. The basis of the claim that women rarely become pregnant by rape (because that’s traumatic and disrupts ovulation) is plausibly alleged by Emily Bazelon to be experiments by a Nazi doctor. The “experiments,” by the way, didn’t actually involve rape. They involved mock executions – a presursor of waterboarding, and may have been misinterpreted to boot:
Stieve published 230 anatomical papers. With the data he gathered pre-execution, as well as the tissues and organs he harvested and studied, he could chart the effect of an impending execution on ovulation. Stieve found that women living with a looming death sentence ovulated less predictably and sometimes experienced what he called “shock bleedings.” In a book published after the war, Stieve included an illustration of the left ovary of a 22-year-old woman, noting that she “had not menstruated for 157 days due to nervous agitation.”
Stieve drew two conclusions that continue to be cited (for the most part, uncritically). He figured out that the rhythm method doesn’t effectively prevent pregnancy. (He got the physiological details wrong but the conclusion right.) And he discovered that chronic stress—awaiting execution—affects the female reproductive system.
…
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists warned that saying rape victims rarely get pregnant was “medically inaccurate, offensive, and dangerous.” But the anti-abortion doctor Jack Willke, former head of the National Right to Life Committee, insisted otherwise. “This goes back 30 and 40 years,”he told the Los Angeles Times in the midst of the Akin furor. “When a woman is assaulted and raped, there’s a tremendous amount of emotional upset within her body.” Willke has written that “one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant” is “physical trauma.”
Medical people who promulgated the theory in the pro-life cause have even more egg on the face than do I.
I’ve often said “I’ve never argued [this or that discreditable theory]” on various topics. Mea culpa, mea culpa! I have argued that pregnancy rarely results from forcible rape. But there are mitigating factors (since this isn’t a real Confessional, I can whine about mitigating factors).
The issue was highly politicized, and I was in one of the two camps, distrustful of the other with more than a little justification, since “they” tactically focused on “the hard cases” and argued out of both sides of their mouths. Remember “rape is a crime of violence, not of passion”? Citing that, I usually, if not invariably, accompanied the “trauma-disrupted ovulation” claim with the related claim that forcible rapists, bent more on humiliation of the victim than sexual satisfaction, typically don’t linger long enough to ejaculate. I haven’t heard that one refuted yet. But confirmation bias was there, too, and I did buy the “trauma-disrupted ovulation” argument at least a little.
Oh: the Friends of Feticide aren’t the only ones to argue out of both sides of their mouths. We pro-lifers focused and continue to focus on what ought to be easy cases: partial-birth abortion and sex-selection abortion, for instance. “Not only,” saith the fictive pro-lifer, “is pregnancy from rape vanishingly rare, but we have a Speaker’s Bureau full of beautiful and accomplished young women who were conceive by rape, for whose mothers we should all be ever-so-grateful for doing the right thing, bringing them to full term to brighten the world by their beautiful, accomplished countenances. Did we mention that they’re beautiful? And accomplished. And pious?”
Still, I’d be much obliged if someone could prove that it’s Bazelon, not Jack Willkie, who conned me. I’d appreciate a morally pristine and medically reliable source for my former talking point. (Chirrup. Chirrup. Chirrup.)
But until then, my default position now is that if a rapist ejaculates, however common or uncommon that is, pregnancy is as common as from any other “unprotected” sexual act.
Comments on the merits welcome. Comments suggesting that I’m a bastard aren’t – as aren’t suggestions that I be beatified for admitting, with mitigators, that I was wrong.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
