Rape, Todd Akin | featured news

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."