Abortion, Legitimate Rape | featured news

Democrats scored decisive Senate wins in Missouri and Indiana after candidates supported by the tea party and evangelical Christians made controversial remarks on rape, pregnancy and abortion that appeared to cost them the support of more-moderate voters in their party.

Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill is taking aim at Republican challenger Todd Akin with a new series of TV ads featuring rape survivors upset about Akin's position on emergency contraception....

While a student in my final year of college, at age 21, I was raped. I have dissected that moment -- the horrifying moment that I became a "victim" -- from every possible angle. I have poked and prodded, examined and re-examined. Regrettably, I have even suspected myself in a desperate, ultimately futile attempt to understand how I became a victim.

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.

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."

... 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."