The GOP Cassandra

“It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” Mr. Akin said of pregnancies from rape. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

What does Akin mean by "a legitimate rape"? Well, according to this news story, FBI and US DOJ studies over the course of years have demonstrated that about one in four rape allegations are fabricated. False. Made up. Created out of whole cloth. 

And we already know that rapists impregnate women at a lower rate than is normally expected. That is, we already know that Mr. Akin is correct.

Fact: An unfertilized human egg lasts 24 hours in the reproductive tract.
Fact: A woman can't get pregnant unless she ovulates.
Fact: Stress delays ovulation.
Fact: Rape is stressful.
Conclusion: Therefore, rape is likely to cause delayed ovulation and result in no pregnancy than a normal act of consensual intercourse.

These facts are individually uncontested
It's only when you put the facts together and draw the conclusion that the liberals begin frothing at the mouth.

Why?

Well, they are heavily invested in abortion.
As the internet has grown, the information surrounding how the abortion industry actually works is slowly revealing itself. No one likes that. It is bad for business. 

All the abortion crowd has left to defend abortion is rape, incest and fetal deformity.
If the truth were to get out - rape actually results in lower than expected pregnancy - one of their three remaining bullets would be lost. Worse, by using the phrase "legitimate rape", Akin actually  alluded to the fact that 25% of rape allegations are faked. One in four "raped" women are liars, actively trying to destroy some innocent man's life. Possibly, their "rape-pregnancy" is likewise a lie.

None of these facts can be borne. 

So, Akin has to be slimed even though the facts are virtually self-evident, even if the facts ALL favor Akin. 

Especially since the facts all favor Akin. 

And notice how the Republican hoi polloi have supported him.
Cough. 

Men in power, whether Democrat or Republican, want legal abortion.
So do women in power.

For as long as blood banks have been in business, we have known that nearly 30% of women have lied to their husbands about the paternity of "their" children.

Powerful men want to keep screwing women. Powerful women want to be screwed by powerful men. Neither group wants anyone else to know. Pregnancy and children are hard to keep secret. Well, they're hard to keep secret if the children are alive. If the pregnancy is aborted and the children are dead, there's no problem.

Have you ever noticed that one-in-three children are the result of cuckolding and one-in-three children are aborted? Funny how those statistics mesh so well.

As I said, Akin is completely correct, but no one can afford for that to get out.

Cassandra, call your office. 


UPDATE:
This doctor says Akin is correct.
Dr. Hilgers also agrees with Akin.


UPDATE: II
Easily obtained DNA testing will certainly have an impact on the discussion.

UPDATE III:
For those who don't trust my analysis, read this.
Seems Karl Rove "joked" that Todd Akin should be murdered for having spoken the truth.
Powerful Republican men are identical to powerful Democrats - they both want one thing, and they want legal abortion so they can keep doing that one thing.

Of Pregnancy and Rape

Republican Todd Akins is in trouble for saying that a woman is less likely to get pregnant as a result of rape then she is at other times of her life.

Everyone is jumping on Akins because he said something wrong. Nobody has really demonstrated exactly what his error is. Either what he said is true or it is not. That is, either raped women get pregnant at lower rates than the general population of sexually active women or they do not.

If he is wrong, then he should apologize.
If he is not, there is no need.

I've heard lots of pro-lifers say the kind of thing Akin just said, but I've never seen the studies that backed it up. So, I thought I would take a look around.

Here's an abstract of a study by the NIMH that indicates "The national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year. Among 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy, the majority occurred among adolescents and resulted from assault by a known, often related perpetrator."

(Remember that bit about adolescents, pregnancy and rape. It will be important later.)

So, according to the NIMH, rape has about a 5% chance of causing a pregnancy. OK. Well, how often would a woman typically get pregnant from one act of unprotected sex with someone she wanted to have sex with? According to this study, there is no difference - rape and consensual sex have the same pregnancy rates. But, according to a second study, if you add up all the numbers on the second study's graph in the most generous way over the 28  days of a typical menstrual cycle, you get a figure of about 3.5%.

So, it would appear that rape may actually increase the chance of pregnancy.
Hmmm... before we have poor Mr. Akin apologize, let's think about this a bit.

According to yet another study, the woman's choice to have sexual activity tends to cluster around her most fertile days. In fact, the study hypothesizes that intercourse can stimulate ovulation. Whether or not that hypothesis is true, we know the six days before ovulation are the woman's most fertile days. Having sex on a fertile day vastly increases the probability of pregnancy.

"Yes", I hear you say, "but we're talking about rape, you idiot, which - by definition - the woman doesn't choose."

Well, true. The woman doesn't choose to be raped.
But the man does choose whom to rape.
And we haven't taken that into account.

For instance, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network statistics on rape victims show:

• 29% are age 12-17.
• 44% are under age 18.
• 80% are under age 30.
• ages 12-34 are the highest risk years.
• Girls ages 16-19 are 4 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault.

Now, we already know from the previous studies that a woman's fertility begins dropping starting at age 30, and drops like a rock at 35. So does rape. In fact, rapists disproportionately pick fertile females. And we already know that men can tell when a woman is fertile.

So, can rapists tell when a woman is fertile? Do rapists preferentially rape fertile women? Because, if they do, then the rate of pregnancy should be much higher among rape victims than among the general population. And if the pregnancy rate is not appreciably higher, then Mr. Akins is, in fact, correct. That is, if consensual intercourse can stimulate ovulation then it is not unreasonable to assume that rape might reduce ovulation. If rapists chose fertile targets but had a lower-than-expected pregnancy outcome, that might be evidence that rape can inhibit ovulation.

In passing, it should be noted that schools of evolutionary psychology generally support the hypothesis that rapists seek out fertile females.

Now, let's recall the NIMH study above. Most of the pregnancies were (a) in adolescents and (b) by a known perpetrator, that is, someone who might know the adolescent well enough to (un)knowingly recognize the tell-tale signsof fertility.

And, with all that in mind, it looks like the experts being brought in to lambaste Akins are actually inadvertently providing support for what he said. 

Consider Politico's piece. The experts Politico quotes indicate that rape creates about twice the pregnancies of normal intercourse. The experts do admit that this is because rapists target fertile young women. But if rapists were actually targeting fertile young women during their fertile periods - as we know is possible - then the rate of pregnancy should be around 15%, not around 5% or 6%.

Hmmmm....

To my knowledge, no one has done a study to determine if rapists target fertile women during their most fertile periods, so I can't tell if Akins is wrong, but no one else seems able to prove he's wrong either. And we don't know if women on hormonal contraception (which might well mask pheromone signals) are raped at a different rate than women not taking hormonal contraception. 

So why the brouhaha? 

Obviously, the MSM and the Democrats want to keep pro-life senate hopefuls out of office. So, they start a tempest about Akins because it will score political points. Akins can't clearly back up what he says, and the pro-aborts know it, so all they have to do is keep the focus off the fact that he might actually be right. This is easy enough to do.

The Republicans will go along with it because Mitt doesn't want something this stupid to derail his bid for the Presidency. As Ronald Reagan said, "if you're explaining, you're not winning." Finding out whether Akins is right is not worth the time.

Akins is being thrown under the bus because it's an election year. I suspect that he will end up like Dan Quayle - vindicated far too late for it to do any good. 

UPDATE
Looks like I'm not alone in this estimation.
This article is a nice discussion of the pregnancy problem from a hormonal point of view.
The author points out that high stress is a known cause of infertility - referenced constantly by fertility experts.

So, if the liberals are to be believed, rape is NOT a stressful event in a woman's life.
At least, that would be a fair summary of their argument, given the science.

Overall, it looks like the entire brouhaha has been ginned up by lying liberals in order to make Todd Akin look bad... and the Republican party is willing to go along with it because it would be too difficult to correct the record.

Update II
Some readers are questioning if rapists really target fertile women.
It seems they do,
Oh, and 7% of women are subject to pre-eclampsia... forgot about that.
This doctor says Akin is correct.
Dr. Hilgers also agrees with Akin.

UPDATE III
Further evidence that rapists may know when women ovulate, and may therefore seek them out preferentially...
  

Hot Potato, Hot Potato

Hot Potato, Hot Potato

Here's an impertinent question. What's the missing number in the latest Illinois health reports? The Illinois Department of Public Health reports 281 abortions were performed on girls 14 and under, an additional 2,902 on girls between the ages of 15 and 17, for a grand total of 3,183 abortions in 2002 on underage girls. So what's missing?

While having sex with a girl between the ages of 13 and 17 is criminal sexual assault or aggravated criminal sexual assault, depending on the age of the rapist, there's a convenient loophole in the collection of statistics. Since the statute covers several kinds of sexual offense, the state of Illinois does not maintain data on the age of sexual assault victims. That is, we know 6,037 criminal sexual assaults were reported in 2002. We don't know how many of those assaults were committed against girls between the ages of 13 and 17.

Why don't we? After all, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, teens "who become sexually active at an early age are especially likely to have experienced coercive sex: seventy-four percent of women who had intercourse before age 14 and 60 percent of those who had sex before age 15 report having had a forced sexual experience" (Guttmacher Institute, Sex and America's Teenagers, New York, 1994). Two-thirds of teen mothers were victims of molestation, rape, or attempted rape prior to their first pregnancy (Family Planning Perspectives, Jan./Feb. 1992).

Abortion clinic personnel are required by law to report cases of child abuse. So, one would assume the people who sell contraceptives to kids and scrape babies out of under-age wombs would certainly report abuse. That makes the following transcript of a taped conversation with personnel at the local Peoria Planned Parenthood all the more interesting (transcripts and MP3 recordings can be found here).

CLINIC: Planned Parenthood. This is Leandra.
CALLER: Hi. Yeah. I was wondering if you guys do abortions there.
CLINIC: No, we don't. I can give you a number that do.
CALLER: Okay.
CLINIC: 691-9073.
CALLER: Okay. Well, could I ask you a quick question?
CLINIC: Um-hmm.
CALLER: My friend told me that since I'll be 14 in March that you guys have to tell my parents. But my boyfriend's 22. Could he take care of that, and we don't have to tell my parents? Because I don't know what would happen if they found out.
CLINIC: Oh. We don't say anything. Everything here is confidential. I mean, as far as outside, that's on you. But we keep everything here confidential.
CALLER: Okay. Well, do you guys have to tell anybody about my boyfriend or anything?
CLINIC: Uh?uh. We don't tell anybody nothing here. I mean, just you. Unless you give us permission, we tell no one nothing. It does put us in a little awkward position because we have been asked to report ... actually we're not ... it's something we're kind of on the borderline whether we're suppose to do anything about or not. Because there are legislators and others there concerned, not that we necessarily think it's our job to decide that. But if we have somebody under 17 coming in with somebody over 18, then there is come concern.
CALLER: Well, are you going to tell anybody?
CLINIC: No. But it would help us to decide ... just don't talk about his age when you come in. I guess I would say that.
CALLER: Okay.
CLINIC: And if you could come in by yourself, it might be best.
CALLER: Oh. So it would be better if he wasn't here?
CLINIC: Usually I would say it's better if he is there. Maybe I can put a note to the counselor you're going to see and tell her, don't ask. Don't ask, don't tell I guess is sort of unfortunately where we have to be about this.

The caller in this instance, was part of a nation-wide sting operation on abortion clinic providers. She was only pretending to be 13. Yet, when a real teenage girl gets pregnant, the father will be over 20 years old in 90% of the cases, one-third will be over 25. The younger the mother, the more likely that the father was three or more years older. 40% of all 15-year old girls who carried to term were impregnated by a man over 20 years old.

Life Dynamics, the Texas organization which called Peoria, along with over 800 other Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics throughout the nation, points out that the overwhelming majority of the clinics contacted either indicated they would not report the situation or instructed the caller in how to avoid being detected. More than 90% of the clinics violated the law, thus helping child predators continue sexually violating children. Study the numbers. If all underage abortions were reported, and if every criminal sexual assault were of an underage teen, it still means Planned Parenthood sold contraceptives to less than three thousand underage kids. If that's true, what happens to their claim that their contraceptive programs reduce teen pregnancy? The numbers don't add up.

Planned Parenthood's research indicates underage girls are being sexually molested by older men. Government statistics and their own employees tell us their clinics don't report this child molestation, despite the law's requirements. The media is silent. Discuss.