This week's Reality Cast is dedicated to the Todd Akin blow up: What it means, what the reaction is all about, and why "rape exceptions" aren't a thing anyway.
Akin's comments about "legitimate rape" went against science and reality, but that's par for the course when it comes to an anti-choice movement that ignores the lives and feelings of women in order to paint them as reproductive objects who deserve no say in how they're used.
It falls to professional media interviewers not just to assume Mitt Romney supports exceptions, because before Akin-gate he had not previously espoused any exceptions, but rather to ask him about when he changed his position, why he has not spoken out before on exceptions, and what he would do if Congress passed a "human life amendment" with no exceptions.
The GOP platform committee did not amend language from the 2004 and 2008 GOP platforms, which “assert the sanctity of human life,” and provide no exceptions to abortion in any case whatsoever. The committee add language opposing drugs such as mifepristone, but members agreed that this platform amendment did not apply to EC.
What we need to constantly keep in mind is how we are deciding who is most in need of help, and reevaluating how that fits in with our values. Are we ok with only helping certain kinds of people who need abortions? Can we strategize for a future in which we don’t have to make these tough decisions? How can we get there?
The real question that needs to be addressed is not whether rape can cause pregnancy. The question is: will measures that ban women who have been impregnated by rape from having abortions be enacted, enabling rapists, with state support, even greater power to deprive women of their dignity and personhood?
