Todd Akin | featured news

In just a few days, a politician largely unknown outside the U.S. has earned the dubious reputation on the world stage as the "rape-gaffe congressman."

Just look at what happened yesterday. While the nation was engulfed in a ludicrous conversation about “legitimate rape,” “forcible rape” and “personhood,” the Republican platform committee approved a draft that reaffirmed the party’s extreme anti-abortion stance and called for a constitutional amendment to protect all human life... Akin and his extreme and offensive views are no longer the fringe.

Representative Todd Akin’s remarks on rape have focused attention on the party’s agenda on restricting abortion rights, a politically volatile topic for Mitt Romney and other candidates.

The Republican Party’s platform committee approved anti-abortion language Tuesday without adding exceptions for rape — a suddenly hot issue after weekend comments by GOP Senate candidate Todd Akin in Missouri.

Showing no sign of backing down from his U.S. Senate candidacy, Todd Akin released a television ad in which he apologizes for his remarks about "legitimate rape" seldom causing pregnancy and asks for forgiveness.

In a surprise news conference Monday, President Barack Obama addressed the controversy surrounding a remark by Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) that women who suffer "legitimate rape" rarely get pregnant. "The views expressed were offensive," said Obama. "Rape is rape. And the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we are talking about doesn't make sense to the American people and certainly doesn't make sense to me. So what I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn't have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health care decisions on behalf of women."

Senior Republicans scrambled to distance themselves on Monday from Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin's comments about rape, which put an unwelcome focus on divisive social issues a week before the party holds its election-year convention.

... Last year, Akin, vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and most of the House GOP cosponsored a bill that would have narrowed the already-narrow exceptions to the laws banning federal funding for abortion—from all cases of rape to cases of "forcible rape."

Missouri Congressman Todd Akin, the conservative Republican U.S. Senate candidate, quickly backed off comments that aired earlier Sunday, in which he told an interviewer that a woman's body "has ways" to prevent pregnancy during rape and that such pregnancies are "really rare."