Where's the wormhole?

Last week, I had to double-check my surroundings to make sure I hadn’t slipped through some time warp into the 19th century, because that would be the only explanation for Rep. Todd Akin’s comments. Apparently, it’s rare for a woman to get pregnant from rape—“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.” But I read the story on my iPhone, went for a run on the human hamster wheel, drove home from campus in a car powered by gas instead of horses and made my dinner on an electric range. By all indications, the first week of law school had not pushed me so far over the edge that I had landed among the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens and the Brothers Grimm.

So why does it seem like Rep. Akin of Missouri, the Republican Senate candidate, is slipping back into 19th-century understandings of female sexuality? Why revert to an understanding of women as nothing more than baby-making machines, rooted so firmly in their biology that the risk of female hysteria to the wellbeing of civilization is sufficient to confine society’s elite women to the home? He argues that a woman’s right to choose should be limited to a very small subset of cases in which it is abundantly clear that the fetus has absolutely no chance of survival, because such an attitude comports with the American people’s exceptional respect for life.

He seems to forget about the quality of the life that could result from an unwanted and/or difficult pregnancy. Can one really argue that a child really has a “life” if he or she is confined to a wheelchair, unable to feed him or herself and incapable of communicating with the outside world? It would be outrageous for the government to mandate the abortion of the fetuses presented with such a future, but it hardly seems fair to force parents to watch a child slowly die as a result of a condition that developed during the first two trimesters of pregnancy. What kind of life can such a child lead, if he or she is completely dependent on machines and his or her parents? We are fundamentally social beings, and the goal of prioritizing life must be evaluated in light of the quality of life that we promulgate—a woman, rather than a male politician, should at least have the right to choose whether or not to continue her pregnancy in the face of life-threatening circumstances.

What about the emotional consequences to the mother of a pregnancy that results from rape? Of course, Akin would argue, based on a vague 1999 article in Christian Life Resources, that “assault rape pregnancies are extremely rare.” In the article, author Dr. John C. Wilke writes that the “emotional trauma” caused by assault rape can change the hormonal balance of the female reproductive system, which “can radically upset” the woman’s ability to nurture a pregnancy. Wilke argues that we have a gravely distorted understanding of rape because some women don’t report incidences of rape, and other women, “pregnant from consensual intercourse, have later claimed rape.” If Wilke and Akin really believe that assault rape is the “greatest emotional trauma” that a woman can experience, why doesn’t this factor into their understanding of rapes that are reported late or not at all? And why shouldn’t a woman whose uterus has apparently failed to secrete the appropriate cocktail of lethal hormones have the right to choose to end her pregnancy?

The physicians Akin cites seem to be the Nazi doctors who selected women who were about to ovulate and sent them to the gas chambers, but didn’t actually kill them. After the near-death experience, the Nazis observed that a high percentage of those women failed to ovulate. Aside from the obvious ethical problems with the Nazi experiments, the Nazi doctors’ experimental methods were also objectively flawed—a truckload of Jews constituted “sample size,” level of evident misery translated into “significance,” and the “control subjects” in the experiments suffered the most and often died.

Akin is stuck in the 19th century in his understanding of what constitutes rape. Based on his definition, rape can really only happen if the woman fights back with every last fiber of her being, because otherwise the body’s biological response won’t kick in. If we subscribe to that definition, rape would be impossible in the case of a woman who decides not to resist her rapist when he threatens her, or a woman who can’t legally consent because she’s drunk, unconscious or otherwise incapacitated. And what about men? Is it impossible for a man to be raped because he can’t get pregnant?

Unfortunately, I have not fallen back into the 19th century. I am solidly in the 21st century, reading about how Akin didn’t do “anything that was morally or ethically wrong,” but just ”misspoke one word in one sentence on one day.” And now I have to say that I agree with Romney’s statement that Akin’s comments are indefensible, and that he should exit the Senate race.

Joline Doedens is a first-year law student. Her column runs every other Monday. Follow her on Twitter @jydoedens.