Robert Cohen/ZUMAPress
Former GOP Senate candidate Todd Akin is not sorry for saying that women don’t usually get pregnant from rape.
Akin tanked his 2012 Missouri Senate campaign by claiming that there is no need for rape exceptions to abortion bans because “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” In his new book due out next week, titled Firing Back: Taking on the Party Bosses and Media Elite to Protect Our Faith and Freedom, Akin says he regrets airing a campaign ad apologizing for the statement, Politico reported Thursday.
“By asking the public at large for forgiveness,” Akin says in the book, “I was validating the willful misinterpretation of what I had said.”
He adds that the media misconstrued his words and explains why he’s still right about rape and pregnancy. “My comment about a woman’s body shutting the pregnancy down was directed to the impact of stress of fertilization. This is something fertility doctors debate and discuss. Doubt me? Google ‘stress and infertility,’ and you will find a library of research” on the impact of stress on fertilization, he writes.
And Akin doubles down on the term “legitimate,” which he says refers to a rape claim that can be proved by “evidence,” as opposed to one used “to avoid an unwanted pregnancy.”
Akin’s comments two years ago perpetuated what Democrats have dubbed the GOP “war on women,” which refers to Republican attempts to limit abortion coverage, contraception, and workplace rights for women.
The release of Akin’s book comes just weeks after the Supreme Court ruled that family-owned companies—which employ more than half of all American workers—do not have to provide contraception coverage for women as mandated by Obamacare if their owners have a religious objection to doing so. The decision is expected to open the floodgates to further assaults on contraceptive access for women.