Todd Akin's Horrible Rape Comments Are Part of A Pattern

In case you somehow missed it, Todd Akin made unbelievably ignorant and misogynistic comments on the Jaco Report, claiming that women who are the victims of "legitimate rape," won't get pregnant:

(crazy comments start around the 4 minute mark)


Akin's quote:

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

This isn't a simple one-time mistake based on talking to a couple nutty "doctors."  This is part of an incredibly disturbing pattern from Akin when it comes to rape.  Some of the lowlights from Talking Points Memo:

Akin is perhaps the boldest among a crop of conservative 2012 nominees who could hamperGOP efforts to take back the Senate in the fall. Akin has called for an end to the school-lunch program and a total ban on the morning-after pill [even in cases of rape].

His claim about “legitimate” types of rape is not completely foreign to the current Republican Congress, however. In 2011, the House GOP was forced to drop language from a bill that would have limited federal help to pay for an abortion to only victims of “forcible rape.” Akin was a co-sponsor on the bill.

Nor is this Akin’s first time suggesting some types of rape are more worthy of protections than others. As a state legislator, Akin voted in 1991 for an anti-marital-rape law, but only after questioning whether it might be misused “in a real messy divorce as a tool and a legal weapon to beat up on the husband,” according to a May 1 article that year in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.