Brian Earp offers a critical analysis of not just Todd Akin, but also of his critics.
Originally appeared at Practical Ethics
Should abortions be allowed in the case of rape? Republican Todd Akin—running for the U.S. Senate from the state of Missouri—thinks not.His reasoning is as follows:
From what I understand from doctors, [pregnancy resulting from rape is] really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment. But the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.
There appears to be no scientific basis for the claim that the trauma of forced intercourse can interrupt ovulation or in any other way prevent a pregnancy; indeed pregnancy is just as likely after rape as after consensual sex, according to the evidence I have seen. This news article sums up the relevant data – though please note that one of my readers [see comments on the original article] takes issue with the standard interpretation of the most frequently-cited studies.
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Let’s start, for now, then, with a bit of data that is not in question: thousands of pregnancies per year, in the U.S. alone, ensue from cases of reported rape or incest–either through the caveat of Akin’s theory that “maybe [the body’s defenses] didn’t work or something” or through the medically orthodox explanation that the body has no such defense. Assuming that falsely reporting rape is relatively rare, as seems to be the case; and acknowledging that many rapes are never reported in the first place, we should be able to agree that pregnancies resulting from rape are a life-changing reality for thousands of women on an annual basis. By “rape” I mean any penetrative act done without clear consent; and here I’m calling attention to the sub-set of such acts that result in conception. I won’t say much about the term “legitimate” — which I find troubling in a hundred ways — simply because other writers have gone to town on it, and I want to say something new.
Now, given everything I’ve just said, what could be going on with Todd Akin’s moral reasoning for him to casually downplay the relevance of rape and incest to the abortion debate while maintaining, as he does, that there should be no exceptions to anti-abortionism even in those cases? Psychologist Brittany Liu uses the notion of “moral coherence” to provide an explanation:
The misuse of scientific information in support of one’s moral position is not new. When it comes to controversial and morally-laden issues such as abortion, it is difficult for people to separate their moral intuitions from their factual beliefs. With Akin, for example, his stance that abortion is fundamentally immoral (even in cases of rape and incest) is tightly wrapped up in his beliefs about the consequences of abortion and the science of female reproduction.
According to Liu, “moral coherence” refers to:
… the power our moral intuitions have to shape beliefs about facts, evidence, and science. Often, our intuitions about right and wrong conflict with well-rehearsed economic intuitions based on a cost-benefit logic. That is, it is often the case that a particular act feels morally wrong even though doing it would maximize positive consequences.
So how do people resolve this kind of moral conflict? In a paper with her colleague Peter Ditto, Liu suggests that people’s desire for moral coherence “initiates a motivated cost-benefit analysis in which the act that feels the best morally becomes that act that also leads to the best consequences.” Applying this logic to the Akin case:
Strong opponents of abortion, like Akin, argue that abortion is fundamentally immoral and should be prohibited. But what if the pregnancy results from a rape? This creates a problem for a principled moral position on abortion. Isn’t abortion always wrong? But is it right to make a woman live with a baby conceived from a violent, traumatic act she did not consent to? One way to resolve the conflict is to convince oneself that pregnancies from “legitimate” rapes are exceedingly rare. If this is true, then prohibiting abortion even in the case of rape really has relatively few costs because it occurs so infrequently. Thus, it is easy to see Rep. Akin’s views about rape and pregnancy (views that are held by many other anti-abortion activists as well) as emerging from his struggle to construct a coherent moral position on abortion that refuses to make exceptions for rape and incest.
The idea of “moral coherence”— a clear cousin of Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory—seems plausible enough, and Liu lays it out in a thoughtful, compelling manner. Unfortunately, this sort of fair-minded effort to understand how it is that an otherwise intelligent person could fall so far afield of reality is rare when it comes to political hot-topics involving moral disagreement.
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Less constructive than Liu’s approach, though undoubtedly well-meaning, is that of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). Here is their press release in response to the Akin affair:
Recent remarks by a member of the US House of Representatives suggesting that “women who are victims of ‘legitimate rape’ rarely get pregnant” are medically inaccurate, offensive, and dangerous. Each year in the US, 10,000–15,000 abortions occur among women whose pregnancies are a result of reported rape or incest. An unknown number of pregnancies resulting from rape are carried to term. There is absolutely no veracity to the claim that “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down.” … Any person forced to submit to sexual intercourse against his or her will is the victim of rape, a heinous crime. There are no varying degrees of rape. To suggest otherwise is inaccurate and insulting and minimizes the serious physical and psychological repercussions for all victims of rape.
This is a very different way to respond to Todd Akin’s misinformed moralizing. Rather than (merely) setting the factual record straight, or (as Liu did) supplementing those facts with a meaningful explanation of Akin’s medically unfounded viewpoint, the ACOG press release adds in some additional bits about how “offensive” and “insulting” Akin’s remarks are, while declaring that there are “no varying degrees of rape.”
I understand the sentiment behind these words. Rape disturbs me deeply. A number of people very close to me have suffered from sexual mistreatment, and I have dedicated a lot of time in my life, especially during my college years, to working with groups that aim to educate about this type of abuse and prevent its occurrence. But there are, I think, some hidden risks in responding to Akin’s argument in the precise manner done by the ACOG. I’ll start with “offensive” and “insulting” and get to point about “varying degrees” later.
If Akin is mistaken on his facts, then provide evidence of his confusion, so that your audience is equipped to rebut him (and others who make the same false claims) when debating difficult subjects such as rape and abortion. To declare that the man’s remarks are “offensive” and “insulting” detracts from the factual dispute, which is the arena in which ACOG is best poised to make a useful contribution. An individual person might, as the case may be, feel offended by Akin’s stupid comments—and many individuals do feel this way, and have good reason to—but to say, in some official capacity, that the statements just are offensive serves only to cloud what is really going on: Todd Akin’s moral view depends upon certain facts being such-and-so; yet the facts are not that way. His moral view is therefore indefensible. Offensiveness has nothing to do it.
Maybe that’s a minor point – and maybe I just don’t like being told that something is “offensive” or “insulting” or anything else in authoritative tones. I can make up my own mind about how to feel; what I want to know are the facts. The abortion debate in the U.S. – or anywhere – will not be resolved by taking offense, or by telling other people to do the same. We need to know what is the case medically, and then we need to try to understand where our opponents are coming from morally, what it is that might be motivating their reasoning (or their lack of reasoning), what can account for their ignorance, and how that ignorance might be replaced with knowledge.
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The other bit of the press release that caught my attention was the assertion that “there are no varying degrees of rape.” I guess this is a response to the equally confusing, yet profoundly troubling (as I said before), notion of “legitimate rape” — which is probably meant to refer to rape that is particularly violent or traumatic, since on the discredited “rape shuts down pregnancy” theory, it’s meant to be extreme stress that triggers the body’s defenses. Even so, I’m just not sure what the “no varying degrees” phrase really means, and–whatever it’s intended to mean–I think it may unwittingly cause problems for anti-rape advocacy, as I’ll explain in a moment.
Rape is something that has to be defined, and it has been defined in a number of different ways across jurisdictions and points of time. The FBI used to define rape as “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” Now it defines it as “the penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” The United Nations has its own definition, and so does the World Health Organization.
There are many different types of rape (on some classifications) which take into account things like the motivation behind the rape, the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, the context of the rape, the method of the rape, and so on. There is anger rape, power rape, spousal rape, stranger rape, acquaintance rape, friend rape, date rape, rape of children, statutory rape, gang rape, and a list of others. There are clearer and less clear crossings of the boundary of consent. There are more and less intentional violations of another’s sexual autonomy. It seems quite clear that a person’s physical and psychological response to rape might vary tremendously depending upon those and other factors, so the claim that “there are no varying degrees of rape” must refer to some other aspect of rape I haven’t thought of. Rape is not a unitary, metaphysical category: it is a value-laden, socio-legally defined phenomenon. Its causes are many and its effects are many. Rape is complicated.
Why does this matter? One reason is that people don’t realize the range of sexual acts, nor the range of situations in which they occur, that have the potential to cause serious harm to another person. To talk about rape as a monolithic thing that doesn’t vary—a self-evidently “heinous” crime that in all cases causes “serious physical and psychological” suffering—as the ACOG press release does, does much to play into the cartoon of rape that occurs in dark alleys, perpetrated by greasy strangers at gunpoint. Take this satirical skewering of Akin by The Onion as a case in point:
Pregnant Woman Relieved To Learn Her Rape Was Illegitimate
Though she was initially upset following the brutal sexual assault last month that left her pregnant, victim Martha Byars told reporters she was relieved Sunday to learn from Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) that her ability to conceive her unwanted child proves she was not, in fact, legitimately raped.
“Being violently coerced into having sex was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, so I take comfort in knowing it wasn’t actually rape,” Byars said of the vicious encounter in which she was accosted in an alleyway by a stranger, pinned to the ground, and penetrated against her will for 25 minutes. “It was absolutely horrific—I felt violated in the worst way imaginable—but thanks to Congressman Akin, I now realize it must, at some level, have been consensual after all.”
The intention of this satire is clear, and its grim point is more or less effectively conveyed. But it also highlights a problem with the discourse around rape in our society, which turns on a collective mental picture of rape as being the sort of thing experienced by The Onion’s Martha Byars. That’s not the only sort of sex that counts as rape legally; and it’s not the only sort of sex that causes problems morally.
When a person is penetrated sexually without consenting to it, the person doing the penetrating is very rarely a stranger. According to one source, the statistics break down like this:
– Someone with whom the respondent was in love: 46%
– Someone that the respondent knew well: 22%
– Acquaintance: 19%
– Spouse: 9%
– Stranger: 4%
So for sheer factual reasons, to begin with, we need to move away from the “stranger in an alleyway” model of rape, and think about the sorts of harm that can occur with nonconsensual sex between acquaintances, friends, or lovers.
The moral goal is clear. It should be that whenever sex occurs, both parties want it. On the far end of missing this goal is a violent attack at gunpoint. Somewhere in the middle might be a nonviolent, alcohol-fueled encounter between people who are newly dating and whose consent-signals are muddy or honestly misunderstood. And on the near end might be a partner who consents to sex even though he’s not particularly in the mood. Harmful sex—definitions of rape to the side—can take many forms, and the degree of harm is not the same across the board.
Indeed, the psychological impact of the various forms of nonconsensual sex might range pretty widely. And not necessarily in the ways that first come to mind. If a friend or partner pushes sex, for example, this violation of trust might have a profound effect on the victim—even more profound than if the pushy sex were enacted by a stranger. Furthermore, a lot of harmful sex occurs when the person doing the penetrating doesn’t think of the act as rape—since “rape” (“legitimate” rape?) is the sort of thing that only scary criminals do while brandishing a knife.
If we want there to be less sexual harm in the world, then we need to think about the manifold ways that harm can come about, and contribute to a discussion of rape that gets men and women thinking seriously about consent in places other than alleyways. We need some nuance. While the ACOG statement was surely well-intentioned, its “offended” tone and its portrait of rape as something that doesn’t admit of any degree of anything, that is “heinous” in all instances, and that invariably causes severe physical and psychological harm, paradoxically calls to mind a model of rape—the “stranger” model used in The Onion piece—that obscures the more complicated harms occurring in the messy real world of sexual interaction.
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So what’s my point? I’ve covered a lot of ground in this post with no single thesis in mind, so let me leave you with a few take-away considerations.
1. Todd Akin is (apparently) wrong on his facts. Traumatic sexual encounters are no less likely to lead to pregnancy than gentle, affirming, consensual intercourse.
2. Todd Akin is not (simply) an idiot who hates women. I don’t know Todd Akin, so I cannot say what’s in his heart. He clearly does have a motivated moral reasoning system, as each of us does, whose operation extends from certain—arguably objectionable—premises, to mistaken (even dangerous) factual conclusions, through the mechanism of something like Liu and Ditto’s “moral coherence.” My point is that we should try to understand what is going on in his mind, so that we can more effectively combat the garbage that comes out of his mouth.
3. It is important when responding to baseless claims to show the baselessness of those claims in measured, unambiguous tones, without deciding for our readers just how “offended” or “insulted” they should feel about the maker of those claims. The debate over abortion involves a lot of shouting and name-calling, but we have to remember that we are all motivated moral reasoners, and that well-intentioned people can come to opposite conclusions about complicated subjects. If our opponent rests his moral case on a set of facts that do not hold, we should be very careful to get those facts as straight as possible, and press our opponent to defend his view on some other basis than the empty facts he started with. And we’ll be much more persuasive to others who may share our opponent’s view, if we can determine why he was mistaken in the first place using theories other than “he’s an asshole” or “he’s a moron.”
4. We should be thoughtful about how we talk about rape. Both the ACOG and The Onion made earnest efforts to remind their readers of just how traumatizing rape can be, on their way to making a medical point about the relationship between rape and pregnancy. But they both—directly in the case of The Onion, and indirectly in the case of ACOG—reinforced a one-size-fits-all myth about rape, according to which it is fundamentally a physically violent, uniformly traumatic crime—the sort of thing that happens outside, in the middle of the night, and leaves its victim bleeding and bruised. Such rapes do happen, though they are comparatively rare. And that they do happen at all breaks my heart. But we have to remember that sexual harm goes way beyond those “alleyway” cases, takes many forms, and can be traumatizing in ways those cases don’t capture. Broken trust. A friendship violated. Consent not respected—by a spouse, or a lover you made yourself vulnerable to. We need to step back a bit from our definitions, and our taking-of-offense, and keep our eye on what matters. Sex should always be wanted. Harm should always be avoided. There are many ways to cause sexual harm; and let’s be aware of, and talk about, the gamut.
We need a little room for nuance in our public conversations—even if the topic is rape—lest we forget the point of our discourse.
Photo—ctrouper/Flickr
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