On Wednesday, Representative Trent Franks, a Republican from Arizona, made some odd comments while talking about rape and abortion: “The incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.” The first reaction had by many was that this just showed how little he and the rest of the G.O.P. know about women’s bodies or women’s lives. And that is fair to say, even if, as Jonathan Chait and others have pointed out, Franks was not (or not overtly) in the pseudoscientific wonderland of Todd Akin, the congressman who said there was a mechanism that prevented pregnancy in the case of “legitimate rape.” One study estimated that twenty-five thousand pregnancies result from rape each year—a number that is not by any measure low.

Even as he tried to explain his remarks, Franks showed himself to be to the social sciences and criminology what Akin was to the biological sciences. The remark came as Franks argued for a bill that would ban all abortions after twenty weeks; he was objecting to an amendment that would have made an exception in cases of rape and incest. Why, if the incidence was really so low, would such an exception be a problem? The answer seems to have to do with how Franks think a real rape would be handled. Where, he asked, was the requirement for a police report, which, he suggested, should normally be filed within “forty-eight hours”? That time frame, he said, “is what completely negates and vitiates the purpose for such an amendment”; it was “impossible” for him to imagine otherwise. “To say that we wait until then, to say that there’s a rape or incest involved, is waiting too long,” he said. What woman who had been raped, in other words, wouldn’t have made up her mind about her pregnancy before twenty weeks had passed?

This may be marginally less cartoonish than Akin’s view, but it is no less unkind or unrealistic. Many rapes go unreported; the experience is also likely to be profoundly disorienting, the ambivalence about a pregnancy wrenching. There are women who make a deliberate choice to carry a pregnancy that resulted from rape to term, but it is a hard choice—one Andrew Solomon has written about—and one that deserves more time, not less. (And, in fact, most rape exemptions allow for a doctor’s letter rather than a police report, and a wider time frame.)

But there is also something that Franks and the G.O.P. do know about the legislative process, particularly at the state level, that may be easy to miss if you don’t live in states like Wisconsin or Alabama or North Dakota. Anti-abortion-rights groups and politicians have engaged in a concerted strategy to chip away at the right to choose, bit by bit, in practical ways. Maybe regulations on clinics multiply, or women have to undergo intrusive ultrasounds, or the legal window is closed, week by week. As Jeffrey Toobin pointed out recently, nineteen states passed forty-three different such restrictions in 2012, pushing up against the requirement, laid out by the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, that there not be an “undue burden” on women as they decide what should happen to their pregnancies, their bodies, and their lives. At least one of those laws—perhaps from Franks’s home state of Arizona—is likely headed to the Supreme Court, and could be the basis for a challenge to Roe.

Each restrictive move is presented as a modest, reasonable step, or as one that hardly touched anybody (or anybody respectable), even as women, whether those in states like Mississippi, with no clinic within hours of them, or rape victims putting their lives back together, are abandoned. “The rape thing was something the Democrats injected,” Franks said later. “I never would have dealt with that issue.” That is the problem.

Photography by Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty.