http://m.washingtonpost.com/politics/todd-akins-rape-comments-find-sympathy-among-conservative-women-in-his-district/2012/08/27/732fd27c-f076-11e1-adc6-87dfa8eff430_story.html

Interested readers can chose for themselves if this is reasonable or clueless.

To the author of the piece, although I agree that in a sane world, someone like Akin SHOULD lose his race, not only for being an insensitive jerk, but also for showing his pre-school level understanding of reproduction, I doubt this will hurt him in the least with his supporters. They will take the position that although they don’t like what he said, it’s STILL better than voting for the dreaded pro-choice candidate instead. Many of these constituents are single issue voters: they want Christianity to be the order of the day in government, and they don’t care how warped their candidate is, as long as he’s “on our side.”

People are up in arms about Akins’ medieval views of rape, but what is more shocking to me is his fundamental lack of understanding of basic biology – and he’s on the Science and Technology Committee?????? Ack Ack Ack.

Barack Obama is in favor of “late term abortions” and is on record as opposing giving any support to a child who survives an attempted abortion.

Interesting terms you use, embryos vs living and involved citizens. They are both human and both alive. Are you proud of that moral position?

2 points and I am done at this thread:
1. Abortion is as gray an issue as it can get. Sometimes it is completely appropriate and necessary, and sometimes it is frivolous and impulsive. You will never hear either extreme of those shouting down the loudest acknowledge this perspective.
2. If Mitt Romney were to run as an independent candidate as of now, I would vote for him as he is a better choice outside the Republican party than our current occupant of the White House who is running for himself, not as a President interested in solving the real issues this country is struggling with. It won’t happen, but watch the convention next week implode on women’s issues and the wrath of god via Issac.

Good luck Americans, you need it!

This is simply not true. While that’s a criticism brought up regarding the study, the study wasn’t constructed in such a way as to say — one way or another definitively — whether the pregnancy was directly caused by the rape. It was simply a question asked on the survey, and we assume — perhaps incorrectly — that people will answer it as truthfully as they can (since there’s little incentive to lie in this specific kind of research).

But that’s the whole point of the second and third studies I cited in the above comment. When you have a second or third datapoint that confirms your first datapoint, you have what we call in science a more robust finding.

I have not found any research to suggest that rape-related pregnancies are virtually non-existent or negligible (e.g. less than 1% or heck, even 0.01% of rapes) — suggestions made by not only Rep. Akin, but also other commenters in this thread.

Isn’t it enough that (primarily) women are abused by (primarily) men in this manner, that we now also call into question just how bad the trauma is? Women get pregnant by rape, end of story. Three scientific studies suggest the percentage of women who do so is in the 5 to 10 percent range — with some specific populations reporting much higher rates.

If someone wants to point me to research that says otherwise, I’m all ears.

John

I agree. And neither of you doctors who replied to me said one word about the study you originally cited. One of the main issues is that many of the pregnancies were not caused by the rape itself, but by consensual sex near the time of the rape.

There are other problems with the methodology used, but apparently your bias or agenda prevents you from seeing any of this or commenting in public about those problems.

I’m guessing both of you are fans of “settled science”, let me know how that bland diet is working for your ulcer, and be careful to use only FDA approved leeches.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15625149

The critique raised by a comment to the original research paper itself cited research that is (a) 17 years old, (b) has never been replicated, and (c) had a research sample size of a whole 10 people. Red flags all.

Additional research supports that rape-related pregnancies is in the 5 to 10% range. See for example, Gottschall & Gottschall (2003), which conducted a randomized sample survey of 405 women who had been raped. 26 of them reported pregnancies due to the rape, for an incidence of 6.42%. When the researchers adjusted for use the contraceptives, the rate climbed to 7.98%.

Compare this to per-incident pregnancy rate in consensual, unprotected sex in a large-scale study (Wilcox et al., 2001) of 3.1%.

In other words, the study found women who were raped were nearly twice as likely to get pregnant from the rape — arriving at the exact opposite conclusion that Akin suggested.

Science is amazing and fun — when you have the facts and know what the hell you are talking about. If you don’t, then you should just shut up. Some people seem to revel and take pride in their ignorance; these are not the kinds of enlightened, self-aware folks we want running our country.

References

Gottschall, JA. & Gottschall, TA. (2003). Are per-incident rape-pregnancy rates higher than per-incident consensual pregnancy rates? Human Nature, 14, 1-20.

Wilcox, AD., et al. (2001). Likelihood of conception with a single act of intercourse: Providing benchmark rates for assessment of post-coital contraceptives. Contraception, 63, 211-215.

There is no defense for indefensible behaviors that this post relates. It is a shame there will be a quantifiable percentage of people who will defend this man’s comments for no other reason than the party he allegedly represents.

Think about the term “blind loyalty”. Or, not.

Kind of makes that snarky comment about doctors and statistics look like projection. You do know what that is?

Know whats the leading cause in birth complications? Stress. Guess what rape causes?