Doctors: Todd Akin pregnancy claim bogus
By KEVIN ROBILLARD | 8/20/12 2:43 PM EDT
The medical community on Monday debunked Rep. Todd Akin’s claim that women who are raped are less likely to become pregnant, with a prominent physician dismissing it as “bogus” and two academic studies contradicting the Missouri Republican’s comments.
“Rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency,” concluded the authors of a 1990s study that found one out of every 20 rapes results in pregnancy, for a total of more than 32,000 rape-pregnancies each year in the United States. A separate 2003 article in the journal Human Nature estimated that rapes are twice as likely to result in pregnancies as consensual sex.
“The short answer: There’s no basis to what he’s saying,” Jonathan Gottschall, a professor at Washington and Jefferson College who co-wrote the 2003 Human Nature article with his wife, wrote to POLITICO in an e-mail. “If anything, the evidence is the opposite: Rape victims have a higher likelihood of conceiving, per-incident of intercourse.”
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79895.html?hp=l3
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