“What about in the case of rape?” an interviewer asked Congressman Todd Akin, the Republican party’s nominee for Senate in Missouri, in an exchange on abortion. “Should it be legal or not?” Akin had an answer:

Well you know, people always want to try to make that as one of those things, well how do you, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.

How many ways is this troubling? It is hard to count. There is the biological ignorance, or perhaps disinterest: one can, indeed, get pregnant from rape. Ask the thousands of women (and children) it happens to; better yet, if you are Congressman Akin, apologize to them. And then realize, as Akin apparently has not, that people possessing a “female body” are also part of the political conversation, not just the mystery doctors he spoke to. There is the puzzling idea that the putative rarity of pregnancies caused by rape would make it any less of a “tough sort of ethical question.” There is the concurrent dismissal of dilemmas that lead people to positions other than his on abortion—or, as he put it, “one of those things” that people “always try” to make something of.

Perhaps most glaringly, there is “legitimate rape.” What is “illegitimate rape”? Akin offered some idea when he co-sponsored a bill that tried to change language about federal funding for abortions for victims of “rape” to cover only “forcible rape.” But his biological nonsense expands the question of what even that means. What is his picture of the sort of rape scenario that would cause the female body to “shut that whole thing down,” absent divine intervention? (And if that’s what the Congressman had in mind, it raises a whole other set of issues.) Does he think that all rapes unfold like abduction scenes in silent movies, with someone thrown over the shoulder, kicking and screaming, and that the violence somehow causes the machinery to go offline, or activates some hormonal force field? What about rape at gunpoint, when a woman’s best option for staying alive might be staying very still, and her best option for staying sane to be as detached as possible? Or does Akin think that doing what one could to survive would delegitimize the rape—or that a legitimate victim is one who sees rape as a fate worse than death? Is it fear that shuts that whole thing down, or disgust? Fear and sex and pregnancy are not strangers. What about someone who is twelve years old, or mentally incapacitated, or unconscious? The problem here is not just whether Akin thinks conception during rape is possible, but what he thinks rape is.

And how, in areas other than abortion, is he guided by his sense of “legitimate rape”? He is willing to suppose that the crime-contraception might not “work or something,” but if a woman who says she was raped is pregnant, is he less likely to believe her? Would it be a tie-breaker, if the evidence were ambiguous? This is not only a domestic question; in the Senate, what would he say and do about initiatives to treat rape as a war crime? Would the thousands of women who were left pregnant after the war in Bosnia and the genocide in Rwanda make him skeptical about what happened, and wondering if action was really necessary?

Akin’s statement, after his remarks were widely attacked—and mocked; don’t miss Andy Borowitz’s take—did not answer these questions.

In reviewing my off-the-cuff remarks, it’s clear that I misspoke in this interview and it does not reflect the deep empathy I hold for the thousands of women who are raped and abused every year. Those who perpetrate these crimes are the lowest of the low in our society, and their victims will have no stronger advocate in the Senate to help ensure they have the justice they deserve.

He later added, on Twitter, “‘To be clear, all of us understand that rape can result in pregnancy & I have great empathy for all victims. I regret misspeaking.’- Todd”—which had not been clear at all. He went on to emphasize, in case anyone missed it, that he believed a woman who became pregnant as the result of a rape should not be able to have an abortion.

Is Akin just an outlier, an odd Republican out there? It would be a mistake to be comforted by that idea. The Senate is not a small job, and Akin, in his race against Senator Claire McCaskill, has been leading in the polls. That may change: “Is it possible to win a Senate race with 0% of the women’s vote?” Nate Silver of the Times tweeted. “Asking for a friend.” But he is not the only extreme candidate whose nomination reflects the priorities of the Republican base; given a long season of attacks on Planned Parenthood and family planning generally, this is hardly an aberration (it is also an argument for sex-education); and Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s running mate, co-sponsored the bill with the “forcible rape” line, too, and is against an abortion-ban exception for rape victims. (And, as Talking Points Memo noted, Democrats have been quick to point this out.) Romney has been all over the place on abortion, but on Sunday his campaign said in a statement (via the Times) that the candidates “disagree” with Akin, and that “a Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape.” [Update: Perhaps realizing that that did not go far enough, Romney, in an interview Monday with National Review, called what Akin said “insulting, inexcusable, and, frankly, wrong.”]

Beyond that, there is a notion, common in conservative rhetoric lately, that desperation is always elsewhere, and that the crises in ordinary lives do not need to be contemplated or worried about—not by nice people. They are rare; something has gone wrong; maybe the complaint isn’t legitimate; maybe it’s their own fault. That indifference goes beyond the question of rape and abortion.

Photograph: Bill Clark/Getty