Todd Akin’s rape comments may have been born in Minnesota

Where on earth did Rep. Todd Akin get the idea that rape victims rarely get pregnant? Right here on earth, probably — Minnesota.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch says Akin may have gotten the information from a 1972 paper authored by Dr. Fred Mecklenburg, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

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, adding 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.

A woman exposed to the trauma of rape, Mecklenburg wrote, “will not ovulate even if she is ‘scheduled’ to.”

(h/t: Matt Sepic)