“Legitimate” nutballs
by digby
Rep. Phil Gingrey, an ob-gyn and chairman of the GOP Doctors Caucus, explained to the audience at the Cobb Chamber of Commerce breakfast Thursday in Smyrna, Ga., that Akin wasn’t far off on the science when he said rape victims rarely get pregnant because their bodies have “ways of shutting that whole thing down.”
“I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things. It is true,” Gingrey said, according to the Marietta Daily Journal. “We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he?”
“But the fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you’re not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman’s body shutting anything down because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak,” Gingrey continued. “And yet the media took that and tore it apart.”
Gingrey also defended Akin’s theory that women who claim to be rape victims are often lying about it.
“‘Look, in a legitimate rape situation’ — and what he meant by legitimate rape was just look, someone can say I was raped: a scared-to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents, that’s pretty tough and might on some occasion say, ‘Hey, I was raped.’ That’s what he meant when he said legitimate rape versus non-legitimate rape,” Gingrey said. “I don’t find anything so horrible about that.”
Gingrey also addressed the campaign season comments by GOP senate nominee Richard Mourdock in Indiana, who said that pregancy from rape “is something that God intended.”
“Mourdock basically said ‘Look, if there is conception in the aftermath of a rape, that’s still a child, and it’s a child of God, essentially,” Gingrey is quoted as saying Thursday.
I’m at the point where I’m going to need to know my doctor’s political beliefs before I hire him. There are just too many wingnut doctors in Congress spouting ridiculous views for me to take for granted that the medical profession isn’t filled with them.
Aside from the absurd “shutting the whole thing down” premise, (in which he shows a frightening ignorance for a medical doctor)he reveals the underlying assumption: women are lying when they say they’ve been raped. And they lie not just when they “get themselves” pregnant, they lie about rape all the time. In fact, people like Gingrey tend not to believe rape even possible (except, of course, when it’s a racial affair.)
This is one of those rare misogynist intersections where you can see quite clearly that the issue is female sexuality and (the rare and unique) power it has over men. The stupid birth control “slut” argument of the last campaign did the same thing.
Gingrey is a misogynist, patriarchal OB-GYN. Yikes ….
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