Todd Akin, a Tea Party Republican six-term U.S. Congressman who is now running for the U.S. Senate from the state of Missouri, says that women’s bodies know if they are “legitimate rape” victims and automatically can just “shut down” a resulting unwanted pregnancy — so there’s no need to even discuss abortion in cases of rape.
Asked about abortion in cases of rape, Rep. Akin responded, “From what I understand from doctors… if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Congressman Akin was appearing on a local St. Louis Fox station talk show (second video, about four minutes in.)
Akin, 65, clearly is opposed to a women’s right to choose, is running against Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill.
So, let’s be clear here. If Congressman Akin becomes Senator Akin, he will be voting on Supreme Court nominees — not to mention many nominations of federal judges. No doubt at some point he would be voting on ENDA, and the repeal of DOMA.
If you know anyone in Missouri, send to to them.
Talking Points Memo adds:
Akin is perhaps the boldest among a crop of conservative 2012 nominees who could hamperGOP efforts to take back the Senate in the fall. Akin has called for an end to the school-lunch program and a total ban on the morning-after pill.
His claim about “legitimate†types of rape is not completely foreign to the current Republican Congress, however. In 2011, the House GOP was forced to drop language from a bill that would have limited federal help to pay for an abortion to only victims of “forcible rape.â€
Nor is this Akin’s first time suggesting some types of rape are more worthy of protections than others. As a state legislator, Akin voted in 1991 for an anti-marital-rape law, but only after questioning whether it might be misused “in a real messy divorce as a tool and a legal weapon to beat up on the husband,†according to a May 1 article that year in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The PollTracker Average shows Akin leading McCaskill by a margin of 49.7 percent to 41.3 percent.
 Hat-tip: Little Green Footballs