Rep. Todd Akin (R) MO closing the incoherence gap

Listening to statements from Barack ‘you didn’t build that’ Hussein ‘Romney causes cancer’ Obama, Joe ‘they’ll put yall in chains’ Biden, not to mention Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Nancy Pelosi, or Harry Reid, you could be excused for thinking that the GOP was suffering an incoherence gap when compared with the Democrats. They are generally well matched in other areas.

Rep Todd Atkin, the Republican nominee for the Senate from Missouri, has just substantially closed that gap with his assertion that rape does not cause pregnancy:

Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri who is running against Sen. Claire McCaskill, justified his opposition to abortion rights even in case of rape with a claim that victims of “legitimate rape” have unnamed biological defenses that prevent pregnancy.

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Abortion is an extremely vexed issue based on the ending of the life of the unborn. The main problem is that neither side can agree on what constitutes a live human being. Some contend it is at conception, others at the stage where the fetus is viable on its own, while others contend it is at birth. No side is likely to gain the upper hand on this.

To the ‘at conception’ group, any abortion is murder, and so on. This is best left as a moral issue, which is not the concern of the state. The outlawing of abortion will not stop it happening and is only likely to cause a black market in backyard abortionists with an inevitable rise in the death rate of such procedures.

To claim though, that some theory that has no scientific basis as a justification for forcing a rape victim to carry the perpetrators child to birth is abhorrent.