Um, maybe it's the emergency contraception

Maybe rape victims can get help here.

So you have this guy, Republican U.S. Rep. Todd Akin, running for the U.S. Senate in Missouri who sits on the House Science Committee – he sits on the House Science Committee – saying that victims of “legitimate rape” don’t get pregnant because they have some magic biological mechanism that shuts down their fertility.

I think there might be something else at work here: 

Here in America, victims of “legitimate rape,” I mean “forcible rape,” I mean “violent, brutal, super-traumatic stranger rape” tend, if they survive, to report the attack pretty quickly to the police.  And the police take them to hospitals.  

                                         Taylor Ferrara clues you in to legitimate rape.
And, the doctors at the hospitals offer these victims emergency contraception, which short-circuits any incipient conception.  That's why they call it "contra-ception."  This is a service that I doubt very many rape victims turn down because they're thinking, "Wow, I'm just thrilled to be pregnant even if it took enduring a rape to do it."

So there you have it – the magic lady parts that spring into action during “legitimate rape” is only ordinary, garden variety morning after Plan B.  But, there's a problem:  We all know right-wing, pro-life know-nothings like Akin consider emergency contraception abortion and they would gladly deny it to rape victims and every other woman on the planet if they had half a chance because, you know, the sanctity of life.

What about those other rape victims – the 13-year-old repeatedly violated by her father or uncle or stepfather, the college student who drinks too much or is slipped a date rape drug at a frat party or bar, the kidnap victim held prisoner in her attacker’s back yard for years, the woman who can’t fight back when her date (or her boyfriend or her husband) decides that no mean yes?

They’re obviously not victims of “legitimate rape” so if they get pregnant they should just shut up and have the resulting kid and raise the resulting kid and not “blame” the resulting kid because their lives, their mental health, their families and their futures have been ruined.  No, the only consideration is that precious little bundle of cells growing in their bellies.

Until the little bastards get here.  Then it’s every millionaire for himself.  Cut food stamps, slash Medicaid to the bone, get rid of WIC (the Women Infants and Children nutrition program), cut Head Start, reduce unemployment benefits, cut welfare, starve poor school districts, close public housing, close homeless shelters, shut down homeless feeding programs.  

Made rape victims pay for their own rape kits.

Heck, cutting WIC even affects the unborn because their poor pregnant mothers can't get the nutrition they need.  But that's somehow okay.  Let them all starve, let them wear rags, let them die in the streets (I mean back alleys) or hills. Just not in our sight, please.  

The poor "born" deserve what they get because their lazy, fornicating,drinking, drugging, undeserving, jobless, foreclosed-on, under-educated parents don't have defense jobs, haven't joined the military and just don't measure up to Conservative standards of American rugged individualism and self-reliance. 

We all know what's being said here: No abortion, no exceptions, no matter what.  But in order to dehumanize rape victims so you can deny them abortion services in their direst hour of need, you first have to distinguish between "real" rape victims and the pretend kind and then you have to convince yourself that "real" rape victims don't really need abortion anyway because their own bodies take care of the problem. 

This is not just what Akin believes, it is what a great many "pro-life" advocates believe, though they're not dumb enough to say it out loud.  

Gosh, and Republicans wonder why they have a gender gap problem.  They also have a "compassion gap" problem the size of the Grand Canyon.