It’s understandable why Democrats want to use Todd Akin as a proxy for Republicans’ views about abortion. The Missouri congressman opposes the right of rape victims to obtain abortions because (a) these victims can unconsciously control whether they become pregnant and (b) only “legitimate” rapes count. Both concepts are imbecilic. More importantly, from the Democrats’ perspective, they’re unpopular.

Polls about abortion are notoriously confusing—a great deal depends on how you ask the questions—but an overwhelming number of Americans support a rape victim’s right to choose. According to a CNN/ORC poll this month, eighty-three per cent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal “when the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest.” At the same time, only thirty-five per cent of respondents believe that abortion should be legal “under any circumstances.” A far greater forty-seven per cent believe that it should be legal “only under certain circumstances.” (Paul Ryan, the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, believes abortion should be illegal even if the pregnant woman has been raped; Mitt Romney’s current position is that rape victims should be allowed to obtain abortions.)

In one respect, these polling numbers are good news for abortion-rights supporters: more than eighty per cent of the people think that abortion should sometimes be legal. But the recent focus on only one aspect of the debate does a disservice to the pro-choice cause, because it provides a misleading picture of abortion in America. According to the authoritative Guttmacher Institute, there were about 1.2 million abortions performed in 2008, the last year for which complete statistics are available. And according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, there are about ten thousand to fifteen thousand aborted pregnancies from reported rapes each year. (Contra Akin, women who have consensual sex get pregnant at about the same rate as women who’ve been raped—between about three and five per cent of the time.)

What these numbers mean is that the vast majority of women who have abortions did not become pregnant because of rape. But the political debate is not about that majority. Indeed, the focus on rape victims creates a malevolent dynamic. Abortion becomes something that women can only earn by hardship, rather than something they can freely choose.

Anti-abortion forces created this impression, and the Supreme Court has reflected it. In the famous Casey v. Planned Parenthood decision, in 1992, which is still the leading case on abortion rights, the slim five-Justice majority said that a state may not restrict access to abortions that are “necessary, in appropriate medical judgment for preservation of the life or health of the mother.” Both the rape exception and the “health of the mother” exception turn on an evaluation of whether the pregnant woman provides the authorities with a good enough reason to be allowed to have an abortion. Still, abortion opponents have fought for years to get rid of the health exception, claiming, in some cases, that the bar of legitimacy has been set too low. Rick Santorum, the one-time Presidential candidate, called the health exception overly broad, and thus “phony.” John McCain said that health exceptions had “been stretched by the pro-abortion movement in America to mean almost anything.”

The final months of a tightly contested election are probably not the best time to be having a serious debate about abortion rights. Democrats, like President Obama, are understandably trying to keep the discussion on the ground most favorable to them by talking only about the rights of rape victims. But abortion rights are too important—to all Americans—to limit the discussion to this small, if important, part of the problem. Abortion rights are fundamentally about women’s equality. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, women’s “ability to realize their full potential … is intimately connected to their ability to control their reproductive lives.” Abortion rights, Ginsburg went on, hinge “on a woman’s autonomy to determine her life’s course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature.”

But as framed by Democrats and the President, the current debate about abortion—centered as it is around rape victims and the health exception—put women in the position of supplicants, seeking permission to end their pregnancies. Most people, fortunately, think there are circumstances where that permission should be granted. But true freedom is not freedom to ask permission—it’s freedom to make a decision. That’s what pro-choice really means, and it would be healthy for abortion-rights supporters to say so clearly and often.

Photograph by Sid Hastings/AP Photo.