A Clarification in The War On Women. Rep. Gingrey Speaks.

It's very good of the Republicans to keep that war as clear as possible, because otherwise we with the fleeting memory capabilities might forget.  This way we won't.

Rep.  Phil Gingrey (R-Ga), used to be an ob-gyn and is still a wingnut.  He clarified Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" comments:

“‘Look, in a legitimate rape situation’ — and what he meant by legitimate rape was just look, someone can say I was raped: a scared-to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents, that’s pretty tough and might on some occasion say, ‘Hey, I was raped.’ That’s what he meant when he said legitimate rape versus non-legitimate rape,” Gingrey said. “I don’t find anything so horrible about that.”

He also argued that women DO have a way of "shutting all that down,"  meaning that a nervous and frightened woman won't ovulate!  Gingrey knows this:

Rep. Phil Gingrey, an ob-gyn and chairman of the GOP Doctors Caucus, explained to the audience at the Cobb Chamber of Commerce breakfast Thursday in Smyrna, Ga., that Akin wasn’t far off on the science when he said rape victims rarely get pregnant because their bodies have “ways of shutting that whole thing down.”
“I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things. It is true,” Gingrey said, according to the Marietta Daily Journal. “We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he?”

An interesting theory.  I wonder how that could be tested in the cases of rape and if that "not-ovulating" thing would work in a microsecond or so, say, at the time of the rape, or if it might take a few months of tension to happen.  I tend to think it's the latter case because the hormones releasing the egg are not working instantaneously but over some amount of time in the cycle.

But it's that first quote which is the really interesting one because Gingrey removes the curtain to show us the sculpture.  It's called False Rape Accusations.  That's what those boys mean by a rape not being a "legitimate rape."  The woman is lying.

If you cruise certain kinds of MRA sites on the net you will find large flowering False Rape Accusation subcultures, like bright green mold patches in a lab!  On some of those sites 90% of all reported rapes are false accusations, and in essentially all of them at least half of all rapes are not real.  And given that I was cursed at birth by that "see-all-sides" flaw, I understand where all that comes from.  For heterosexual men who never plan to rape anyone the looming menace of false accusations is the only truly frightening bit about rape, at least until someone they know becomes a rape victim.

But that's no excuse to inflate the likelihood of false accusations.  They are a small minority, and inflating their numbers will become a true injustice to all those women (and men) who actually are raped but get no help in a culture which has prepped people not to believe them in the first place.

Of course Gingrey ends his clarification by defending Mourdock's comments, too:

Gingrey also addressed the campaign season comments by GOP senate nominee Richard Mourdock in Indiana, who said that pregancy from rape “is something that God intended.”
“Mourdock basically said ‘Look, if there is conception in the aftermath of a rape, that’s still a child, and it’s a child of God, essentially,” Gingrey is quoted as saying Thursday.

So what do we get when we put together all these measured slight clarifications?  That women who are raped are not terribly likely to get pregnant, that women who say they are raped might not be raped and that women who ARE pregnant from rape are still carrying a child of God.