THE REPUBLICAN WAR ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS CONTINUES

Rep.  Todd Akin - (APPhoto/St. Louis

Post Dispatch, Christian Gooden)

        The Romney team has distanced themselves from Republican Rep. Todd Akin’s totally inappropriate and offensively sexist attempt in an interview two days ago to justify banning all abortions, based on his distinction between what he called “legitimate” rape and what he implied was consensual rape. The former, he argued, never results in pregnancy because the body of a woman who is forcibly raped blocks it! Therefore, by implication, any time a pregnancy results, the woman must have enjoyed it.
        Responding to the backlash from his remarks, Akin has since said he “mis-spoke,” but the damage was done. Members of his own party are demanding that he withdraw as the Republican nominee in the Missouri senatorial campaign. Their concern is political not moral. They're worried about the adverse political fall-out, not about women's rights.
        The truth is that Akin was simply representing the general opposition of ultra-conservative Republicans to abortion under any circumstances, a view shared by Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan, who co-sponsored a bill that declared life begins at conception and defined a fertilized egg as a person. Fortunately the bill never made it to the House floor.  In his fourteen years in Congress Ryan has consistently voted against abortion rights. “I’m as pro-life as a person gets,” he declared in a 2010 magazine interview. Now here he is pretending to be offended by a Republican colleague who was trying to justify the view they both hold about abortion!
        As for Romney, it should be noted that he, too, has expressed his support for an amendment defining personhood as beginning at conception. The inconsistency of his and Ryan’s denunciation of Rep. Akin, given their own similar views on the subject, is another example of their flagrant hypocrisy.
        The Republican war on women’s rights continues, and it is thoroughly consistent with their opposition to and misrepresentation of the Affordable Care Act, which gives women greater control over their health care and free access to several new preventive services.
        Again I ask, why would any thinking woman want to vote for Romney and Ryan?