Rape Results In More Pregnancies, Not Less
Todd Akin United States CongressFact-checking Todd Akin As you've probably heard by now, in an interview Sunday, Missouri Representative and Republican Senate nominee Todd Akin said he believed that rape-related pregnancy was "really rare." He continued by saying that, "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." So, now for the facts. Pregnancy resulting from rape is not rare. In fact, a woman is more than twice as likely to get pregnant during a rape than during consensual sex. That said, there may actually be something to the idea that the human female body has evolved an ability to resist rape-related pregnancies, although the potential mechanism is pregnancy termination, not prevention, so it's almost certainly not what Akin was talking about. Akin now admits he "misspoke" in the interview, although it's not entirely clear which part he's referring to. Akin's intentions...