"It is estimated that some 32,000 American rape victims are made pregnant by their rapists every year in the US. Science has actually found that raped women are more likely to get pregnant."



An 18-year-old Bosnian Muslim rape victim. (photo: Nina Berman/Sipa Press)

Dear Rep. King: Meet a Pregnant Rape Victim

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

ollowing in Rep. Todd Akin's footsteps, evangelical extremist Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said today of pregnancy from rape, "Well I just haven't heard of that being a circumstance that’s been brought to me in any personal way, and I'd be open to discussion about that subject matter." It is estimated that some 32,000 American rape victims are made pregnant by their rapists every year in the US.

Science has actually found that raped women are more likely to get pregnant.

Rep. King should get out more. He'd encounter the problem fairly easily in war zones, where this Bosnian woman was raped as an act of war and impregnated by a militiaman trying to wipe out her people:

There have been thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands like her in the world’s killing fields in the past 30 years. Paul Ryan, Todd Akin and Steve King deny their existence because they don’t want to deal with the human and moral dilemma they pose, and want to deny these women the right to abortion - i.e. they want to take the side of the rapists who invaded their bodies and altered them. The Ryan-Akin axis has a message for such women: get over it.

Even Muslim televangelist Yusuf Qaradawi is willing to make an exception for these women, despite his general opposition to abortion. But our fundamentalists are more absolutist than their fundamentalists.