By Mona Charen
Friday, August 24, 2012
Todd Akin would do his party and his country a service by
stepping aside. The rest of the campaign will be dominated by this side issue,
possibly denying Republicans a key Senate seat. To use the words
"legitimate" and "rape" in the same phrase betrays a
serious lack of judgment. Only about 1 percent of women undergoing abortions
report that they were raped, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute. One
percent is not zero.
That much having been said, I must offer a mild dissent
to the widespread view expressed by both Republicans and Democrats that what
Akin said was outrageously "stupid." The "legitimate rape"
wording was atrocious, agreed. But much of the commentary has focused on Akin's
mistaken belief that women's bodies have the capacity to "shut down"
the reproductive process in cases of rape. (Akin has since acknowledged that he
was wrong.) Interviewing Akin on "Good Morning America," George Stephanopolous
spoke for many when he said, "A lot of people are wondering how an idea
like that can even get in your head."
Really? Is it such an outlandish idea? I looked it up,
and it appears that there is no evidence that pregnancies are less likely in
cases of rape, but it didn't seem out of the realm of possibility to me. Many
things about the human body are peculiar and amazing. And frankly, more people
than are today admitting it must believe that a woman's mental state has
something to do with her capacity to conceive. Consider that every woman
(including me) who has ever experienced infertility is told, even by some
doctors, that she should try to "relax."
Though dismissed as a myth for some time, the role of
stress in infertility is being reconsidered now by specialists. Dr. Margareta
D. Pisarska, co-director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine at Cedars
Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles told WebMD that "it's becoming more
and more important, in terms of what studies we do, to focus our efforts on the
physiological effects of stress and how they may play a role in
conception."
The body is capable of impressive feats. The breast milk
of mothers who give birth to preemies is chemically different from the milk
produced for full-term infants. It has a higher concentration of fat, protein,
iron, chloride and sodium -- which is believed to aid the development of
premature infants.
Kevin Williamson notes in the current National Review
that high-status men have more male children than ordinary men. Is it
"stupid" to believe that this phenomenon is real?
Testosterone levels vary widely among men and are known
to change in response to events. The liberal blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote an
absorbing piece more than a decade ago about the role of testosterone. It seems
that when tennis players' testosterone levels were monitored before and after a
match, researchers found that "the winner of any single game sees his T
production rise; the loser sees it fall. The ultimate winner experiences a
postgame testosterone surge, while the loser sees a collapse. This is true even
for people watching sports matches. A 1998 study found that fans backing the
winning side in a college basketball game and a World Cup soccer match saw
their testosterone levels rise; fans rooting for the losing teams in both games
saw their own T levels fall."
Akin's mistaken belief in the unlikelihood of
rape-induced pregnancy is now being lassoed into service against other
Republicans. Virginia Republican Senate candidate George Allen, who denounced
Akin, is nonetheless being flayed by the Washington Post for having once voted
to confirm a judge who had once, long before, expressed views similar to
Akin's.
So Akin's views are scandalous and can be used to
discredit (however implausibly) other Republicans. But the views of the leaders
of the Democratic Party --favoring abortion for any (including sex selection)
or no reason throughout the nine months of pregnancy -- are not controversial.
The Democratic Party's support for partial-birth abortion is not worthy of
skepticism. The views of the president of the United States -- opposing a law
providing that a baby accidentally born alive after a botched abortion be
protected from the abortionist's knife -- is not shocking. No Democrat has
ever, so far as I know, been challenged by a member of the mainstream press to
distance himself from the president's extreme abortion position.
Akin is guilty of having his facts wrong. Many of his
critics are guilty of worse.
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