A lot of people are writing about the politics of abortion today. Mitt Romney came out yesterday and pledged that his administration would allow women whose pregnancies were caused by rape to get an abortion. That position is contrary to the Republican Party’s platform. It’s deeply contrary to Paul Ryan’s record in Congress. And it is at least implicitly contrary to some of Mitt Romney’s prior statements. The issue broke into the news when Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin suggested that women have some kind of magic power to prevent non-consensual conception. But that’s a bit of a distraction. The real issue is what should and should not be legal.
It seems evident from the way the whole GOP, from top to bottom, raced to distance themselves from Todd Akin’s remarks that the Republican strategists don’t think forcing women to have their rapists’ babies is a viable political position. But why, then, does the Republican Party take exactly that position in their platform? Is Akin being singled out just because he made a biological error?
Remember that Rick Santorum said that women should consider their rape babies to be gifts.
“I believe and I think that the right approach is to accept this horribly created, in the sense of rape, but nevertheless, in a very broken way, a gift of human life, and accept what God is giving to you.”
Santorum made that statement in January during Piers Morgan’s show on CNN. Many people responded with shock, but there was no outcry from Republicans that Santorum drop out of the race. In fact, Santorum went on to win several primaries and wound up finishing in second place.
Some people are arguing that Akin is getting rough treatment from his own party because his outlandish comments reflect badly on Paul Ryan who has co-sponsored several extreme anti-choice bills with Akin. Perhaps there is something to that, but I suspect the real issue is that Akin is unpopular in the Missouri GOP and he isn’t seen as a strong candidate by the national party. They want to replace him because Claire McCaskill is the most vulnerable Democrat running for reelection and they don’t want her to wriggle off the hook.
In any case, the offensive and toxic part of Akin’s remarks was not his false theory of natural spermicide but his position that women should be forced to bear their rapist’s children. And that’s the position of the Republican Party. So, what’s the big deal?
