Akin not alone in bogus rape theory, more nutz weigh in including Dr. Jack C. Willke
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The assertion can be traced back to Dr. Jack C. Willke, the former president of the U.S. National Right to Life Committee. Willke and his wife, Barbara, are leading antiabortion advocates and authors of the book “Why Can't We Love Them Both: Questions and Answers About Abortion."
They contend in the book, first published in 1971, that “assault rape” rarely results in pregnancy because the assault traumatizes the woman and makes her body less habitable.
It’s ”just downright unusual” for a woman to get pregnant from a rape, Willke said in an interview Monday. He said studies have shown this to be true, but produced little evidence beyond a few footnotes that cite a handful of decades-old papers.
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“There is no such thing as a legitimate rape,” Willke said, adding that Akin should have said “assault rape." The term “assault rape” or “forcible rape” makes it clear that the woman suffered some sort of trauma -- the type of thing that supposedly shuts the reproductive system down, Willke said.
more: http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-todd-akin-rape-theory-origins-20120820,0,7783860.story
= new reply since forum marked as read
...and I generally believe that when someone who deserves no better is busily making a fool of themselves it's best to keep silent and not interfere, but DAMN. Full disclaimer: I'm not a developmental biologist, but I've been teaching general vertebrate and mammalian biology for decades so I know the basics pretty well.
Insemination and fertilization are not the same thing-- a circumstance that Akin and Willke seem to forget. And PREGNANCY is something entirely different than either. The point is that regardless of the circumstances of insemination, fertilization normally occurs many hours to days later, generally within the oviduct, far from any physical trauma directly attributable to sexual assault and long afterwards. And pregnancy takes even longer to begin, at least if we define pregnancy as embryo implantation and initiation of HCG production (I mean, who could possibly be pregnant prior to that?)
Rape by itself, i.e. forced sexual penetration of the vagina, affects neither ovulation (controlled by the hypothalamus and pituitary, a LONG way from "down there"
nor implantation (dependent upon the condition of the endometrium, a pretty resilient tissue, typically well after insemination).
So like I said, maybe I'm missing something because development isn't my expertise, but what I do know leads me to suspect that Dr. Willke doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. He's a physician-- I wonder if he skipped class when women's reproductive biology was discussed?
