In places such as Rwanda, Congo, or Bosnia where rape has been used as a weapon, access to safe abortion services could help many women who become pregnant and unable to care for their children, or will may spend a lifetime disabled and traumatized. There have been reports in Darfur among other places, of men claiming that they are raping women in order to force the birth of "mixed" babies.However, even with this brutality -- violent rape used as a weapon, with pregnancy as the intended result -- women who have been raped in conflict in Sudan or otherwise rarely receive abortions, Human Rights Watch has found.

Representative Akin's comments were condemned by President Obama as well as by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, who now say that they would not oppose abortions for rape victims. But the Congressman's ideas, though extreme, are consistent with the same radical anti-abortion view behind the same, 39-year-old U.S. legislation and policy that effectively denies even minimal abortion services to rape victims in some of the world's ghastliest conflict zones.

Though this policy is the U.S.'s alone, humanitarian groups have little choice but to apply the anti-abortion standard applied to all of their sources of funding. Faced with the enormous logistical hurdles of separating U.S. aid from that of other donors, organizations are ultimately hamstrung into broad application of these restrictive abortion policies.

Some other major donors have expressed concern for the U.S. policy, such as the Norwegian government, which recommended that the U.S.remove these restrictions on rape victims, and the European Parliament, which recently passed a resolution urging EU member states to segregate their funding from U.S. funding due to the abortion restrictions.

Sopie in't Veld, a Dutch Member of the European Parliament who has been leading European efforts, told me, "The European Parliament has repeatedly taken a very firm stance on the right to a safe and legal abortion. It is a right for all women, but certainly for women who are pregnant as a result of rape as a weapon of war. It is unacceptable that EU policies and external relations are subject to the U.S. ban on abortion and the compulsory silence on the matter."

"Not allowing U.S. humanitarian aid to cover abortion services for women raped in conflict is adding insult to unimaginable levels of suffering," said Nobel Laureate Jody Williams, who is spearheading the Nobel Women's Initiative's new International Campaign to Stop Rape and Gender Violence in Conflict. "Lifting U.S. restrictions should be an immediate first step toward helping survivors of sexual violence. It would also help send a signal to women everywhere that they are not to blame and the ones who bear the shame are the rapists, not the women they rape."

In responding to Akin's comments, Obama stated, "What I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn't have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health care decisions on behalf of women." He is exactly right. But the Helms Amendment and related legislation means that these men are still, indirectly, making health care decisions on behalf of tens of thousands of women in conflict zones. Hopefully, Obama will act on this commitment and work to lift the ban on abortion speech and services to women raped as a weapon of war. And perhaps Americas will take note of the ways that Akin's comments, however extreme, reflect the anti-abortion mission that lead the U.S. to effectively deny those services to the women and girls whose need is most particular and severe.