Doubling Down on Dumb: Right wing Extremists Deny Facts. Again.

The right wing extremists that Bachmann and Cravaack run with claim a lot of ignorant, hateful things; they are routinely factually deficient, one might better say factually defective, as they seem not only to lack an acquaintance with reality but to be incapable of recognizing it.

As our commenter Minnesota Central noted, the right wingers supported redefining rape as 'real' rape/ forcible rape, 'legitimate' rape as only when it is violent enough.  Drugging a woman wouldn't be rape to them.  Taking advantage of a 12 year old girl, as in statutory rape, or incest, hey -- that's not rape to them, that's just getting a head start "on God's plan", as Sharron Angle describes it. Threatening a woman into sex, without leaving any bruises......nah, they don't want to define THAT as rape either.  Unless you can show blood, bruises, and broken bones, your rape just doesn't count, at least, not ENOUGH for an abortion.

These are prominent members of the party - the GOP, the Tea Party - who have opposed and obstructed the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.  Wow -- how surprising is THAT?

What views they hold seems to change slightly, depending on who is listening, depending on who they are trying to extract donations from, but the far right misogyny is true of Paul Ryan, that is true of Mittens on R-money too,except when he decides that rape ISN'T a justification for abortion EVER, and nor are incest, or saving the life of the mother.

Here is the reality; one assessment from the CDC puts the rate of pregnancy from rape at around 5%, more than 32,000 a year. 
Rape is under-reported, so it could well be much higher. Another study found rape resulting in pregnancy even higher:

"published in 2003, went even further: It found that a single act of rape was more than twice as likely to result in pregnancy than an act of consensual sex.

The study, “Are per-incident rape-pregnancy rates higher than per-incident consensual pregnancy rates?” was published in the journal Human Nature by Jonathan A. Gottschall and Tiffani A. Gottschall, two professors at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. They used data from the federally administered National Violence Against Women survey. There, they found a sample of 405 women between the ages of 12 and 45 who had experienced one incidence of rape that included intercourse.

Of those 405 women included in the sample, 6.4 percent — or 26 women — reported a pregnancy that year. A separate large-scale study showed that, for the general population of women that age, the per-incidence pregnancy rate for a single act of intercourse is 3.1 percent."

So a woman is MORE likely to become pregnant from rape, NOT LESS.  If there are any hormone activity going on, it is on the male side of rape, and it is encouraging not discouraging pregnancy. From Popular Science:
I called Gordon Gallup for his perspective on rape-related pregnancy. Last year, during a conversation about the antidepressant effects of semen, he mentioned a theory that the nature of a rapist's ejaculate has something to do with his reproductive success. When I asked him to elaborate on that, he told me that semen contains follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinizing hormone (LH), which trigger ovulation during the female menstrual cycle. FSH is needed for sperm production, but the presence of LH in high levels is more mysterious because it's not important for male fertility. It's possible, Gallup says, that seminal fluid released during forced sex contains higher-than-normal levels of these hormones -- LH in particular -- which may trigger ovulation in the victim.
There's no direct evidence yet of sex-induced ovulation in humans, although there's some very new research hinting at the possibility. The LH in semen has been shown to trigger ovulation in camels, alpacas and llamas. Semen also makes female koalas ovulate, although LH hasn't been identified as the active ingredient in that species' semen yet. A 1973 study found that 70 percent of conceptions from rape occurred outside a woman's most fertile time. And a 1949 study cited seven women who reported becoming pregnant due to rape, despite having not had a period for up to two years leading up to the assault.
The idea that semen produced during rape is especially primed to promote pregnancy seems less far-fetched considering the well-established evidence that what a man is doing when he ejaculates affects the chemical makeup of his semen. Studies on artificial insemination show that semen collected from a man who used his imagination to become aroused and ejaculate is much less likely to result in conception than a sample collected from a man watching porn, Gallup says. Even more potent is semen collected after coitus interupptus, i.e. pulling out during actual sex. The conditions under which a man becomes aroused and ejaculates has been shown to affect factors like sperm count, shape and mobility.
If semen changes based on context, it's plausible, Gallup asserts, that participating in a rape can affect its chemical makeup. Ovulation-inducing semen would be especially useful during rape, which is usually a one-time encounter. As sinister as it is, the ability to unconsciously adjust semen to make it more potent during rape could be one reproductive strategy that evolved in men to increase their reproductive success.
In addition to the devastating physical and emotional consequences of rape for the victim, things are also grim from the evolutionary perspective. "The problem with rape if conception occurs, is that it precludes making an informed mate choice, which is the principal means by which females maximize their fitness," Gallup says. "And it means that the female is not going to be subject to protection and provisioning by the child's father. Women are left holding the bag, so to speak."
Women appear to have evolved mechanisms to counteract these tactics and control their fertility. I've written about these kinds of dueling reproductive forces, known as antagonist coevolution, before. Some quick examples in human females: Research shows that women engage in less sexually risky behavior around ovulation, when they're likely to get pregnant, and their hand-grip strength, a measure of physical resistance, is enhanced during ovulation if they read a sexual-assault scenario, a mechanism that may have evolved to enable the female to more effectively resist rape when they're fertile.
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Clearly a slight increase in hand strength is not sufficient to prevent rape, or to alter the outcome of conception.  However the following, continuing from the Popular Science Article, does suggest women's bodies might be having more spontaneous abortions.  Continuing from the article:
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In saying that women "shut down" pregnancy after rape, Rep. Akin unwittingly stumbled upon the concept that women's bodies reject unfamiliar sperm. In 2006, Gallup and his co-author Jennifer Davis published their theory that preeclampsia, a common pregnancy complication that can result in spontaneous abortion, evolved as an adaptive response to unfamiliar semen. (I say unwittingly because Akin was more likely referring to a theory that the fear and trauma of rape causes a woman's fallopian tubes to tighten, thus preventing pregnancy. This idea, proposed by John C. Willke, a physician and a former president of the National Right to Life Committee, has been lambasted by other doctors.)
Psychologist and writer Jesse Bering explained the preeclampsia idea in his excellent post, which I highly recommend you read in its entirety: "By the early 1980s, scientists had started to notice that preeclampsia was more likely to occur in pregnancies resulting from "one-night stands," artificial insemination and rape than in pregnancies that were the product of long-term sexual cohabitation. That it was the woman's prior exposure to the male's semen that was responsible for this pattern was evident by the fact that couples who'd been using barrier contraceptives (such as condoms), or who practiced coitus interruptus (in which the man withdraws prior to ejaculation) before they began trying to conceive also had higher rates of preeclampsia than those who'd been engaging in unprotected sex for some time."
Bering continued, ""It may be useful to think about preeclampsia not simply as a medical anomaly," reason the authors, "but as an adaptation that may have evolved to terminate pregnancies where future paternal investment was questionable or unlikely."
Now, none of this means that rape-related pregnancies are rare, or that biology should be trusted to ward off these pregnancies. The sheer numbers of pregnancies from rape tell us that it's happening -- a lot. And, obviously, preeclampsia is not the solution. Having the right to choose what to do about it is.
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I see where Akin has checked out the facts subsequent to his horrific gaffe.

Here is my problem -- shouldn't Akin have checked out all these facts a long time ago, including well before he co-sponsored legislation on rape and abortion?  His checking out the facts now is laudable, but it is still too little too late.

And it appears to be more than many other Republicans and Tea Partiers have bothered to do; but then there is so much less point for them to check out facts.  They would just replace them immediately with religious superstition and self-serving political ideology anyway.