The politics of rape: Has the GOP lost the Senate?

Republicans were never confident of taking back the Senate in next week’s election, said Jonathan Tobin in CommentaryMagazine.com. But their recent self-inflicted wounds on the issue of rape and abortion may be the “coup de grace” that kills their chances of controlling both houses of Congress. The first offender was Todd Akin, aspiring senator from Missouri, who lost a 10-point lead in the polls with his “mind-boggling” statement back in August that since women can’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape,” there’s no need for a rape exception to anti-abortion laws. Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock caused a new national uproar last week by saying, “Even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something God intended to happen.” Welcome to the modern Republican Party, said David Horsey in the Los Angeles Times. At least 11 other GOP Senate candidates and the Republican Party’s official platform also oppose an abortion exception for rape and incest victims. More than four in five Americans—including many pro-lifers—support such an exception, but in the GOP, requiring a 15-year-old girl who was raped by her father to give birth “is no longer a radical position.”

The Left should be ashamed of trying to politicize Mourdock’s comments, said Charles Cooke in NationalReview.com. The liberal media twisted Mourdock’s words to make it sound as if he’d described rape as “something God intended to happen,” rather than simply articulating the common Christian belief that all life is sacred. I personally think rape victims should be allowed to have abortions, said Amy Sullivan in NewRepublic.com, but I also think my fellow liberals were disingenuous in their feigned outrage. You don’t have to “hate women and want to control women” to believe that a fetus is a person and that abortion is murder; if that is your belief, then the circumstances of the unborn child’s conception, however awful, don’t justify killing that child.

Everyone better get used to this type of thinking, said Irin Carmon in Salon.com. The moral purists from the right-to-life movement now dominate the Republican mainstream. Thus, you have unsophisticated candidates like Mourdock and Akin “letting the mask slip” on their theocratic worldview; they were recently joined by Rep. Joe Walsh, who opined that thanks to “modern technology and science,” abortion is never necessary to save a mother’s life. These crazy ideas are premised on the conservative Christian view of women as mere incubators and “vessels” for God’s will. Until recently, Republican candidates knew better than to air them in public. Republican leaders “doubtless hate Richard Mourdock right about now,” said Molly Ball in TheAtlantic.com. He just reminded women what their lives would be like in a Republican-controlled country—the last thing the GOP needed in the final days of a toss-up presidential election.

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Democrats need to be careful too, said Bloomberg.com in an editorial. In this election cycle, the GOP may pay a price for its “absolutist” position on abortion. But the Democratic Party has moved away from its “safe, legal, and rare” stance on abortion, adopting the view that all limitations on abortion are wrong, even after the fetus becomes viable. Most Americans, polls show, fall in the ambivalent middle—preferring that abortion remain legal but with “common sense” restrictions. “The militants of either side will not win this one,” and for both parties, giving in to their base would be a “moral miscalculation and a political blunder.”