Whew, I feel so much better knowing this.  Todd Akin, one of Missouri’s Republican representatives in Congress knows all about how rape affects a woman, and he told an interviewer on Sunday:

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors, (pregnancy from rape) is really rare.  If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.  But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something.  I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.”

Actually, it is fairly common to become pregnant from a rape.  In a three-year study by the Medical University of South Carolina, it was found that:

“The national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result…