They just can't stop talking about rape
by David Atkins
They just...can't...stop.
A leader of a California Republican group may have inadvertently revived the controversial subject of rape and pregnancy.
Before arriving at the state GOP's spring convention here, Celeste Greig told this newspaper that pregnancies by rape are rare "because it's an act of violence, because the body is traumatized."
Greig is the president of the conservative California Republican Assembly, the state's oldest and largest GOP volunteer organization. Ronald Reagan once called it "the conscience of the Republican Party."
Ironically, Greig was in the midst of criticizing former Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin for saying that victims of "legitimate rape" rarely get pregnant because "the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." It was a remark that many believe led not only to his defeat in November but also helped tarnish the Republican brand around the country.
"That was an insensitive remark," Greig said. "I'm sure he regretted it. He should have come back and apologized."
Greig, however, went on to say: "Granted, the percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it's an act of violence, because the body is traumatized. I don't know what percentage of pregnancies are due to the violence of rape. Because of the trauma the body goes through, I don't know what percentage of pregnancy results from the act."
I've given many presentations about framing and messaging to various Democratic and progressive groups. The gist of the presentation is about the way that language and metaphor don't just express our way of thinking, but control and mask it.
In that context, one of my favorite powerpoint slides used to be about abortion. I would argue that neither side was completely honest in its framing: after all, if liberals believe in the "my body, my choice" credo, then a pregnancy should be able to be terminated purely by a mother's choice, with or without doctor's approval, all the way until birth. Yet few liberals actually believe that. This problem, incidentally, is part of why Planned Parenthood is finally and smartly shifting away from the language of "choice". While support for abortion rights has remained steady, support for the label "pro-choice" has dropped--largely because of the cognitive dissonance involved in the language for medium and late-term pregnancies (being forced to abort by the horror of an ectopic pregnancy is usually considered more medical necessity than choice, per se.)
Similarly, I used to argue that conservatives didn't believe that life actually began at conception, otherwise they would want to force 13-year-old victims of incestuous rape to bear their rapist's child. And yet few conservatives, I used to say, actually believe that.
I've had to remove that slide from my presentation because Republicans have become so extreme that they can't bring themselves to accept abortion even in the case of rape.
There's still a cognitive disconnect, though: they know that forcing a woman to bear her rapist's child is wrong. But they've also bought into the idea that no abortions can be tolerated. So they must pretend that it's impossible for women to get pregnant, even in rape, unless the woman was secretly enjoying herself.
It's sick and twisted stuff. But cognitive dissonance created by twisted belief systems tends to produce that.
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