Oh gosh… Even the GOP candidate is pleading with Akin to drop out–
ROMNEY CALLS ON AKIN TO STEP DOWN
The AP reported:
GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney is calling on a defiant Rep. Todd Akin to step aside in the Missouri Senate race.
Akin, a six-term House member, has been under fire since saying Sunday that pregnancy could be prevented in the case of “legitimate rape” because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
It gets even worse…
Vicki McKenna sent this in on the Freind Study that Akin cited for his claims that women can shut down pregnancy during a rape.
One of the documents Rep. Stephen F. Freind used Tuesday to support his pregnancy-rape theory cited a World War II Nazi study on pregnancy and stress.
Yesterday, the president of the state affiliate of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said Freind’s use of the study was ”inappropriate.”
Freind (R., Delaware) did not mention the study at a news conference Tuesday, but he repeatedly used as a source for his information Dr. Fred E. Mecklenburg, who cited the study in an article.
In a 1972 article prepared for a publication called Abortion and Social Justice, which was paid for by a group called Americans United for Life, Mecklenburg said “medical research” linked stress and ovulation. Mecklenburg is an obstetrician and gynecologist working in Washington.
“In Germany, during World War II, the Nazis tested this hypothesis by selecting women who were about to ovulate and sending them to the gas chambers, only to bring them back after their realistic mock-killing, to see what effects this had on their ovulatory patterns,” Mecklenburg wrote.
According to the study, wrote Mecklenburg, 64 percent did not ovulate.
Freind, the legislature’s leading anti-abortion advocate, has been embroiled in controversy over his comments that it is extremely rare for women to become pregnant as the result of rape.
Although he retracted earlier statements about a “secretion” that kills sperm, he said Tuesday that stress is one reason few women who are raped get pregnant.
UPDATE: It’s official. The 5:00 PM deadline just passed and Todd Akin refused to step down.
What a disgrace.
