The question is not whether U.S. Rep Todd Akin said a stupid, offensive, outrageous and disgraceful thing.
He did. It was.
What matters is whether what he said bears on contemporary conservative thinking and has implications for public policy as advanced by Republicans generally.
If so, then all women and all decent men might consider sprinting to volunteer at Democratic headquarters.
I’m not suggesting the possibility that all conservative men, or that any other conservative men, believe or dare to advance the absurd and arrogant affront that Akin uttered. I’m wondering only if what Akin said came from a complete vacuum—from his head and heart and mouth and nowhere else.
First, because this is important, let us quote in full what this Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate said to a television station in St. Louis over the weekend. It was on the issue of permitting abortions in cases of rape, which he—like many other contemporary conservative Republicans, notably—opposes.
He said: “It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s 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. You know, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist and not attacking the child.”
He mentioned ramifications for the rapist. He mentioned regard for the fetus. But he didn’t say a thing about regard for the woman, an innocent victim of a violent violation who was left impregnated by her horror.
Indeed, there is an element of the pro-life movement that treats a woman as a mere vessel existing without rights between a man and his offspring.
Akin came back the next day and said he “misspoke.” But he was guilty of more than speaking inadvertently. He was guilty of thinking monstrously.
He did not misspeak. He misthought.
To explore the relevant question of whether his disgrace is isolated or symptomatic, we can best condense the discussion to two relevant cases.
They have to do with two very conservative Republican men—the late Fay Boozman, failed candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arkansas in 1998, and Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who now is Mitt Romney’s choice to exist a heartbeat from the presidency.
Yes, it happened 14 years ago in Arkansas that Boozman, a soft-spoken and well-meaning and uncommonly conservative man, told a Conway civic club that women don’t usually get impregnated from rape.
Then, confronted about that in a televised debate, he stressed that he cared deeply for “the ladies,” and had not said anything about “God’s little protective shield.” Indeed, that had been my phrase in a column about his Conway remarks.
But then he proceeded to contend that, in cases of rape, women experience such fear from the experience that the surge of adrenaline fashions a hormonal circumstance that makes pregnancy unlikely.
Boozman might have had a little momentum until then. He ended up losing by several points to Blanche Lincoln, who would serve a dozen years until Fay’s surviving younger brother, John, could avoid that mistake and ride a Tea Party wave.
To his credit, Fay Boozman, an ophthalmologist, went on to serve commendably as state health director. He later acknowledged that the statistics did not bear out what he had once thought about rape and pregnancy. Indeed, thousands of women get pregnant from rape in America every year.
My point is that there is some evidence of other conservative thinking—beyond Akin—that would cast a dubious eye toward any pregnant woman’s allegation of rape.
Boozman’s eventually abandoned view was entirely less monstrous than Akin’s. But it was a forerunner.
And there were others. A Republican state legislator in Pennsylvania named Stephen Freind, a failed challenger to former U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, proclaimed in 1988 that something happens in women that kills sperm when they are raped. Freind said he’d like to bottle that chemical reaction as a contraceptive. This was before Republicans disapproved of contraceptives.
If there is an element of conservative thought that holds that a woman is not likely to get impregnated by rape, then persons of that element will (1) doubt a woman’s veracity when she alleges rape, and (2) not want her to be allowed legally to rid herself of the pregnancy.
That brings us to Ryan, who, as a House Republican leader, has three relevant public-policy views in this context.
One is that he co-sponsored with Akin a bill, since withdrawn, restricting rape exceptions for federally funded abortions to “forcible rape.”
It was never really clear why that modifier—“forcible”—was inserted. Speculation was that it was designed to require women to prove they had been physically overpowered, as opposed to a statutory rape or one executed through verbal threats.
Either way, it’s hardly sensitive to women victims. It’s innately distrusting of them, actually.
The second is that Ryan co-sponsors another bill with Akin, blessedly dormant, to grant a fertilized egg “personhood,” with all rights thereof.
There is wide speculation about what that might mean. Some think it seeks to undo Roe v. Wade altogether. Some think it seeks to put in-vitro fertilization out of business.
But the truth is that not too many people had thought a great deal about this apparent extremism until Akin’s exercise in monstrosity and the Obama campaign’s pointed mention of Ryan’s assorted partnerships with Akin.
The third is that Ryan has always personally opposed all rape exceptions for abortion, accepting abortion only in threats to the life of the mother.
But the Romney campaign says the presidential candidate favors the rape exception and that, essentially, any devout religious views that might be held by the man Romney would put a heartbeat from the presidency don’t matter.
Yet it’s up to all women and all decent men to decide for themselves whether those views matter—whether, in fact, the full context of all this matters, and whether it should send them sprinting to volunteer at Democratic headquarters.
Gender gaps don’t just pop up without reason.
Romney could have chosen from dozens of running-mate prospects who weren’t deeply allied with Akin. But he picked the one who was.
No one else on the current political stage is as monstrous as Akin, surely. But the guy does have . . . well, it’s called a co-sponsor.
John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.