Female Trouble

August 25, 2012  |  permalink

For some, it took Todd Akin’s “forcible rape” comment to revive the issue this election season. Akin’s loony-tunes declaration that women don’t get pregnant via rape was broadly acknowledged to be so off the mark – the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology reports that five per cent of rape victims of reproductive age become pregnant – that even many Republicans called for him to drop out of the race for Missouri senate. But while we can agree that such whoppers are, at the very least, politically inexpedient for a political candidate, they have made it into the health curricula of some public schools. Read more in my piece for the Guardian.