(A)

Assault (forcible) rape versus statutory rape and other definitions used in a much larger reported figure:

The term actual forced rape

legitimate rape

1. First, let's define the term "rape". We should use the phrase "forced rape" or "assault rape" for that specifies what we're talking about. Rape can also be statutory. Depending upon your state law, statutory rape is intercourse with a girl under a certain age, often 16. Statutory rape can be consensual, but it is still statutory rape. Another category is "date rape". For some reason, this is supposed to be different, but, forced rape is still rape, regardless of whether it occurs on a date or behind the bushes. If a college woman is raped on a date, she should report it to the police and pursue charges. Further, she should undergo a medical examination and treatment, just as she would in the aftermath of an assault rape. It is not a separate category. Assault rape pregnancies are extremely rare...How many forced rapes result in a pregnancy?...There have been some studies. In a statistical abstract of the U.S. in 1989, there were 90,000 rapes reported in the United States. [Bureau of Census Table #283] Another study from the US Justice Department, surveyed 49,000 households annually between the years 1973-1987. In 1973, it reported 95,934 completed rapes. In 1987, the figure was 82,505. The study stated that only 53% were reported to police. Factoring this in, the totals were 181,000 rapes in 1973 and 155,000 in 1987. In August 1995, the US Justice Department, using a different study with different questions, returned a result of 170,000 completed rapes plus 140,000 attempted rapes (210,000). There are approximately 100,000,000 females old enough to be at risk for rape in

the U.S. If we calculate on the basis of 100,000 rapes, that means that one woman in 1,000 is raped each year. If we calculate on the basis of 200,000 rapes, that means that one woman in 500 is raped each year. So, how many rape pregnancies are there? The answer is that, according to statistical reporting, there are no more than one or two pregnancies resultant from every 1000 forced rapes. Does that make sense? Using the figure of 200,000 women who were forcibly raped, one-third were either too old or too young to get pregnant. That leaves 133,000 at risk for pregnancy.

A woman is capable of being fertilized only 3-6 days of a 30-day month. Multiply our figure of 133,000 by by 0.3. Three days of 30 reduces to 1 of 10. Divide 133,000 by 10, and we have 13,300 women remaining. If we use 5 days of 30, then we have 1 of 6. Divide 133,000 by 6 and there are 22,166 women remaining. One-fourth of all women in the U.S. of childbearing age have been sterilized, so the remaining three-fourths comes to 10,000 (or 15,000). Only half of assailants penetrate her body and/or deposit sperm in her vagina1, so cut the remaining figures in half. This leaves 5,000 (or 7,500). Fifteen percent of men are sterile, which drops that figure to 4,250 (or 6,375). Another 15% of women are on the pill or already pregnant. That reduces the number to 3,070 (or 4,600). Now factor in the fact that it takes 5-10 months for the average couple to achieve a pregnancy. Use the smaller figure of 5 months to be conservative and divide the above figures by 5. The number now drops to 600 (or 920). In an average population, the miscarriage rate is about 15%. In this case, we have incredible emotional trauma. Her body is upset. Even if she conceives, the miscarriage rate will be higher than in a more normal pregnancy. If 20% of raped women miscarry, the figure drops to 450 (or 740). Finally, factor in what is certainly one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant, and that's psychic trauma. Every woman is aware that stress and emotional factors can alter her menstrual cycle. To get and stay pregnant a woman's body must produce a very sophisticated mix of hormones. Hormone production is controlled by a part of the brain that is

easily influenced by emotions. There's no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape. This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, and implantation. What further percentage reduction in pregnancy will this cause? No one knows. but this factor may well cut this last figure by at least 50%, which would make the final figure 225 (or 370) women pregnant each year from forced rape. These numbers closely match the 200 that have been documented in clinical studies.

So, assault rape pregnancy is extremely rare. If we use the figure of 200, it is 4 per state per year. Even if we use a figure of 500, we're talking about 10 rape pregnancies per state, per year. 2. In the U.S. in one year, there are more than 6 million pregnancies. Roughly 3 million eventuate in live birth, 1.5 million are aborted and 500,000 miscarry. While each assault rape pregnancy is a tragedy for the mother (not for the baby, though), such pregnancies amount to a small fraction of the total annual U.S. pregnancies. Further, less than half of assault rape pregnancies are aborted, even though that course of action tends to be vigorously pushed by those around the woman.2, 3 Sources: 1 New England Journal of Medicine, A.N. Groth, Sexual Dysfunction During Rape, 6Oct1977, p.764-766.2.Mahkorn & Dolan, "Sexual Assault & Pregnancy", New Perspectives on Human Abortion, University Publisher of America, 1981, pp. 182-199.3 Mahkorn, "Pregnancy & Sexual Assault," Psychological Aspects of Abortion, University Publishers of America, 1979, pp., 53-72.[J.C. Willke, M.D., Life Issues Connector, 4/1999] 3. Of these 200,000 women who were raped, one-third were either too old or too young to get pregnant. That leaves 133,000 at risk of pregnancy. A woman is capable of being fertilized only three days out of her 30-day month. So divide 133,000 by 10, and 13,300 women remain. One-fourth of all women in the United States of child-bearing age have been sterilized. That drops the figure to 10,000. Only half of the assailants penetrate her body and/or deposit sperm. Cut it in half again. We are at one to 5,000.

Fifteen percent of men are sterile; that drops the figure to 4,250. Fifteen percent of non-surgically sterilized women are naturally sterile. That reduces the number to 3,600. Another 15% are on the pill and/or are already pregnant. Now the figure is 3,070. Now factor in something that all adults know. It takes from five to ten months for an average couple to achieve a pregnancy. Using the smaller figure, to be conservative, divide the 3,000 figure by 5, and the number drops to about 600. Finally, we must factor in one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant, and that is psychic trauma. Every woman is aware that stress and emotional factors can alter her menstrual cycle. So what further percentage reduction in pregnancy will this cause? No one really knows, but this factor certainly cuts the last figure by at least 50%, and probably more, leaving a final figure of 225 women pregnant each year, a number that closely matches the 200 found in clinical studies. Source: http://www.abortionfacts.com/online_books/love_them_both/why_cant_we_love_t hem_both_29.asp

(B)

Rape and Trauma

Body Shutdown

1. Humans have evolved highly effective conscious and unconscious response patterns to manage stressful or threatening situations. The brain and body make up a complex interdependent system. Every sensory experience triggers a chain of electrochemical reactions throughout the body: thoughts and impulses in the brain release molecules (neurotransmitters) that transmit information to organs, muscles, and nerves, and then back to the brain in a continuous cycle, stimulating reflexes and reactions, voluntary movements, and thoughts. Most of the affected body systems, known collectively as the "autonomic nervous system," are automatic and operate beyond conscious control. 2. The autonomic nervous system has two complimentary divisions: the sympathetic nervous system, which activates our nerves, organs, and

muscles into a heightened state of arousal and regulates the "fight or flight"mechanism and the parasympathetic nervous system, which controls the bodys calming mechanisms (as well as the freeze response) and is designed to shut down body systems or return the body to baseline arousal levels. These two systems regulate our emotional and physiological states: they become activated and prepare us to respond when we are confronted by a threat, and calm us after the danger has passed. Source: Trauma: Frozen Moments, Frozen Lives By Gaetano Vaccaro, Ph.D. and Joni Lavick, M.F.T. from San Francisco AIDS Foundation

3. In an average population, the miscarriage rate is about 15%. In this case, we have incredible emotional trauma. Her body is upset. Even if she conceives, the miscarriage rate will be higher than in a more normal pregnancy. If 20% of raped women miscarry, the figure drops to 450 (or 740). Finally, factor in what is certainly one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant, and that's psychic trauma. Every woman is aware that stress and emotional factors can alter her menstrual cycle. To get and stay pregnant a woman's body must produce a very sophisticated mix of hormones. Hormone production is controlled by a part of the brain that is easily influenced by emotions. There's no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape. This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, and implantation. 4. When pro-lifers speak of rape pregnancies, we should commonly use the phrase "forcible rape" or "assault rape," for that specifies what we're talking about. Rape can also be statutory. Depending upon your state law, statutory rape can be consensual, but we're not addressing that here .... Assault rape pregnancies are extremely rare. Source: Dr. John C. Wiilke, Physician, author, lecturer, TV and radio
personality and expert in human sexuality. Dr. Willke is the president of the nationwide, educational Life Issues Institute. He has served for ten years as president of the U.S. National Right to Life Committee. Dr. Willke practiced medicine in Cincinnati, Ohio for 40 years, where he was on the senior attending staff of the Providence and Good Samaritan hospitals.Dr. and Mrs. Willke are the authors of six other books in the field of human sexuality.

5. .... What is certainly one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant, and that's physical trauma. Every woman is aware that stress and emotional factors can alter her menstrual cycle. To get and stay pregnant a woman's body must produce a very sophisticated mix of hormones. Hormone production is controlled by a part of the brain that is easily influenced by emotions. There's no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape. This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, implantation and even nurturing of a pregnancy. So what further percentage reduction in pregnancy will this cause? No one knows, but this factor certainly cuts this last figure by at least 50 percent and probably more. SOURCE: (Physicians for Life, via Garance Franke-Ruta)

6. How do you prove rape - or innocence?

How does a woman prove rape if there is no evidence afterwards of violence and no other witness to the act? And how does a man prove innocence if falsely accused? To some such a suggestion arouses terrible anger, but on what basis can we safely conclude that all women are absolutely perfect and only men are evil? Some men may rape, but all human beings can sometimes be tempted to exaggerate or lie, especially if unhappy in a relationship. Sorting out what has actually happened can be very difficult where children or teenagers are involved. In the British press there has been a great deal of publicity about teachers accused of sex crimes they have not committed, whose whole careers have been wrecked as a result of a chance remark by a pupil. The National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers says around 600 teachers a year are falsely accused - a trebling since the 1989 Children's Act. A teacher was taken from his home in handcuffs after three girls claimed he indecently assaulted them in front of a class. The charges were dropped - there were twenty four other girls who witnessed the entire lesson - but not before he lost his job.

The Union's annual conference called on pupils to be expelled if allegations are later found to be false, urging the union to pay for defending these cases in court. But the threat of expulsion could make genuinely abused children terrified to say anything. What do you mean by rape? The vast majority of children, teenagers or adults who claim to be victims of rape, have indeed been raped, physically overwhelmed by a man who has sex with them by force, and rape is a terrible crime, damaging memories for life of an increasing number of women - and men too. Male rape is not unusual. But how far do you stretch the definition of rape? The Oxford Dictionary definition is "forcible or fraudulent sexual intercourse, especially imposed on a woman", but is that enough? The "date rape" movement has gone far further in a new definition of rape and in doing so has unleashed new forces such as the "Take Back The Night" movement which are helping kill off the sexual revolution. Date rape became a household world in the US almost overnight after Ms magazine published the first results of a study on rape in American Universities by Dr Mary Koss, claiming one in four college women were victims of rape or attempted rape. The New York Times published an article the same month on the same theme. Date rape was now a reality, but what was her definition? The female students were asked if they had ever gone out with a man who had put pressure on them to have sex. Pressure might have been verbal, or chemical (plying a woman with alcohol or drugs), not necessarily physical. However 73% of those labelled by Dr Koss as having been raped did not say they thought they had been, and 43% of the "date raped" went on to have sex voluntarily with the same men afterwards. Source: http://www.globalchange.com/books/rpl3c.htm

Located at:
https://www.facebook.com/gateway.pregnancy/posts/410542945671555

ST. LOUIS -- "The question of rape always stirs the emotions whenever it is introduced into the abortion debate," Dr. Fred Mecklenburg wrote in 1972. "Unfortunately, the emotional impact of rape often clouds the real issues and the real facts."

August 22, 2012 USA Today

In this June 11, 2011 file photo, U.S. Representative Todd Akin answers a question from the panel during a debate among Republican Senate candidate hopefuls at the Lindenwood University J. Scheidegger Center's Bezemes Family Theater in St. Charles, Mo. Mecklenburg an assistant clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Minnesota Medical School at the time could not have known how prescient his words would feel 40 years later. While Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., cited only "doctors" as his source of information about the rarity of pregnancy resulting from rape, it is two pages, from Mecklenburg's 1972 article, "The Indications for Induced Abortion: A Physician's Perspective," that have influenced two generations of anti-abortion activists hoping to build a medical case to ban all abortions without exception. In Mecklenburg's original article, he wrote that pregnancy resulting from rape "is extremely rare," and cited as an example the city of Buffalo, N.Y., which had not seen "a pregnancy from confirmed rape in over 30 years." Other cities Chicago, Washington, St. Paul also had experienced lengthy spells without a rape-caused pregnancy, Mecklenburg wrote. The reasons were numerous: Not all rapes result in "a completed act of intercourse," Mecklenburg wrote. He added that it was "improbable" that a rape would occur "on the 1-2 days of the month in which the woman would be fertile." Mecklenburg's third reason seems to have been picked up by Akin, who made his comments in a TV interview Sunday (Aug. 19). A woman exposed to the trauma of rape, Mecklenburg wrote, "will not ovulate even if she is 'scheduled' to." But a host of other research disputes Mecklenburg's conclusions, both on the scarcity of pregnancy following rape and natural defenses to prevent conception. "From a scientific standpoint, what's legitimate and fair to say is that a woman who is raped has the same chances of getting pregnant as a woman who engaged in consensual intercourse during the same time in her menstrual cycle," said Dr. Barbara Levy, vice president for health policy at the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

One widely accepted study suggests a 5 percent pregnancy rate following rape, resulting in 32,000 pregnancies each year. The report was from the Medical University of South Carolina and was published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and cited by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But placing an exact figure on post-rape pregnancy is problematic, primarily because rape is thought to be underreported. Another factor is the availability of over-the-counter emergency contraception, which can prevent fertilization when taken after intercourse. One study from the journal Human Nature in 2003 suggests pregnancy rates are higher after a rape when compared with consensual sex because of the inconsistency of birth control use. Mecklenburg's article was one of 19 in a book called, "Abortion and Social Justice," published a year before the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. In supporting his claim about trauma and ovulation, Mecklenburg cited experiments conducted in Nazi death camps. 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 the effect this had on their ovulatory patterns. An extremely high percentage of these women did not ovulate." Finally, Mecklenburg said it was likely that the rapists because of "frequent masturbation" were unlikely to be fertile themselves. The book was edited by a doctor and a lawyer, and funded by Americans United for Life, the major legal arm of the anti-abortion movement. Americans United for Life was founded by Brent Bozell, a Catholic activist who wrote for the National Review. On Monday, the National Review's editors called for Akin to quit the race, saying there was "no evidence for Akin's biological claim." The dissemination of Mecklenburg's article may have had more to do with the influence of the doctor's wife, Marjory, an early opponent of abortion rights who was a chairwoman of the National Right to Life Committee, an adviser to Gerald Ford's 1976 presidential campaign and director of the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs in the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Today, Fred Mecklenburg is the former chairman of the OB/GYN department at Inova Women's Hospital in Falls Church, Va. He did not return a call seeking comment. Mecklenburg's article, and the statistics cited in it, have been used again and again in the decades since. Hadley Arkes, Amherst College political science professor and senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, cited the Buffalo statistic in his 1986 book, "First Things: An Inquiry Into the First Principles of Morals and Justice."

"The number of pregnancies resulting from rape in this country is minuscule," Arkes concluded, adding, "In addition, the fear induced by rape may interrupt the normal operation in hormones in the body of the woman, which in turn may prevent ovulation and conception." That kind of scholarly declaration has proved irresistible to some politicians. In 1988, Pennsylvania state Rep. Stephen Freind told a radio interviewer that the odds of a woman becoming pregnant after being raped "are one in millions and millions and millions." The trauma of the rape, Freind explained, causes a woman to "secrete a certain secretion, which has a tendency to kill sperm." His source, Freind said, was a "Dr. Mecklenburg." In 1995, North Carolina state Rep. Henry Aldridge told the state House appropriations committee that when women are "truly raped the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work and they don't get pregnant." Christian websites such as Physicians for Life and Christian Life Resources also have posted a 1999 article by J.C. Willke, a physician who was president of the National Right to Life Committee in the 1980s. "There's no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape," Willke wrote. "This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization and implantation." Dr. Jill Powell, a gynecologist at St. Louis University, said misinformation about pregnancy can add to the psychological stress following a sexual assault. Powell was to appear with Sen. Claire McCaskill, DMo., at a news conference Monday that was later canceled. "If someone has heard that medically there's some reason they may not be at risk for pregnancy if they've been sexually assaulted, maybe it would deter them from disclosing information or seeking medical help," Powell said. Tim Townsend and Blythe Bernhard write for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in St. Louis. For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.