Raw Story has uncovered the dark and sinister roots of Akin's rape theory.
During an interview with KTVI over the weekend, Akin had claimed that women were not likely to get pregnant because “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Where did Akin get this bizarre and non-factual theory from? Unfortunately it was not from his deranged mind, but from a pseudo-scientific study, once masquerading as science.
This reasoning, based on 1972 article by a University of Minnesota Medical School assistant professor, has been used for decades by anti-abortion activists to argue that no exceptions to abortion bans are necessary, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The name of this professor is Dr. Fred Mecklenburg and this is a summary of his theory, which he published in an article title,
The Indications for Induced Abortion: A Physician’s Perspective:
Mecklenburg cited a number of factors for his theory, including that not all rapes resulted in “completed act of intercourse” and that it was “improbable” that a rape would occur within “the 1-2 days of the month in which the woman would be fertile.”
But it was Mecklenburg’s presumption that a traumatized rape victim “will not ovulate even if she is ‘scheduled’ to” that appeared to be the basis of Akin’s recent remarks.
However this claim is scientifically false and has been debunked:
From a scientific standpoint, what's legitimate and fair to say is that a woman who is raped has the same chances of getting pregnant as a woman who engaged in consensual intercourse during the same time in her menstrual cycle," said Dr. Barbara Levy, vice president for health policy at the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
http://www.stltoday.com/...
Another study finds that (again from the St Louis Post-Dispatch):
pregnancy rates are higher after a rape when compared with consensual sex because of the inconsistency of birth control use.
But Mecklenburg’s theory gets more disturbing and he turns to Nazi experiments to support his claim (returning to Raw Story):
To support his conclusion, Mecklenburg cited studies that were allegedly done at extermination camps in Nazi Germany.
Nazis reportedly tested the theory “by selecting women who were about to ovulate and sending them to the gas chambers, only to bring them back after their realistic mock-killing, to see what the effect this had on their ovulatory patterns. An extremely high percentage of these women did not ovulate,” the article said.
Other non-scientific findings of Mecklenburg include:
The belief that it was “improbable” that a rape would occur within “the 1-2 days of the month in which the woman would be fertile.”
The belief that frequent masturbation was likely to make rapists infertile
And the belief that pregnancies resulting from rape were very rare.