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California GOP Leader: Pregnancies From Rape Are Rare Because It's An Act Of Violence
It turns out that it's not just male Republicans in flyover states who can't talk seem to talk about rape without saying something completely ignorant.Celeste Greig, the head of the conservative activist group California Republican Assembly (and apparently the creator of the term RINO), was attempting to criticize failed Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin for saying that victims of so-called "legitimate rape" don't get pregnant because "the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."
While she was in the Northern California town of Woodland, she told the local newspaper The Daily Democrat: "That was an insensitive remark. I'm sure he regretted it. He should have come back and apologized."
And then Greig went on to tell the newspaper this: "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."
It's hard to know what Greig found so offensive about Akin's remarks, since she ended up parroting the completely bonkers (and widely discredited) theory that pregnancy from rape is rare. She did manage to avoid using the phrase "legitimate rape" that drew widespread criticism, but it's hard to see what exactly she wanted him to apologize for.
Democrats were quick to pounce on her statements. Nancy Skinner of Berkeley told The Democrat: "If a woman is near-ovulating or ovulating, and sperm comes in direct contact, she gets pregnant -- it doesn't matter what the nature of the act was. It's just outrageous, beyond absurd. It's insulting. It's the same line of thinking of 'If we just dress differently, or behave differently, we won't be raped.' They're basically saying 'while we're being raped, if we hate it enough we won't get pregnant.'"
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