Republicans are rebranding!

2013 is a whole new ballgame for the GOP. Instead of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock making disgusting comments about rape, a Republican woman has decided to invent biology to justify making all abortion illegal even in cases of rape, a belief that only 9 percent of Americans share.

Celeste Creig, president of the volunteer organization California Republican Assembly, told The Bay Area News Group that pregnancies from rape are rare “because it’s an act of violence, because the body is traumatized.”

She didn’t go quite as far as Akin, the former Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Missouri, who suggested that the female body had a way of shutting down when raped or Mourdock, former Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Indiana, who said, “I think that even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

Creig just wants us to believe that the chance of pregnacies is so slight it’s not even worth allowing women to make the choice whether to keep her rapist’s baby.

She went on to add, “I don’t know what percentage of pregnancies are due to the violence of rape. Because of the trauma the body goes through, I don’t know what percentage of pregnancy results from the act.”

Write Amanda Marcotte offered Creig a bit of education:

88 women get pregnant from rape a day in this country. That’s a lot of things, but rare isn’t one of them. — Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) March 2, 2013

Marcotte then linked her followers to a study that found 32,101 pregnancies every year are a result of rape, which is not surprising when you find out that 1,870 women in America are raped every day, about 9 out of 10 of the victims are women— a fact that only comes up when Republicans say dumb things about rape.

To put this in some perspective, about 93 Americans die from car accidents every day, our leading cause of preventable death. We spend billions trying to prevent these deaths. Needless to say, if men could get pregnant from rape, we wouldn’t be able to build enough electric chairs or Guantanamo Bays to punish the perpetrators. Especially considering that 31 states grant rapists visitation or custody rights.

These continued rape gaffes suggest that the problem isn’t Republican candidates. They say terrible things all the time without destroying their careers. The problem that banning abortion in cases of rape is indefensible. Despite this, this exact position is in the GOP platform and advocated by leading Republicans including former vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan.

If the GOP won’t give up this ridiculous stand, I’d at least ask them to save their best rape gaffes until we’re a few weeks from the 2014 election.

[Photo via Santa Clarita Valley Republicans]