In yesterday's post, I should not have suggested that Republicans succeeded at writing "forcible rape" into national legislation so as to limit access to abortion for victims of sexual assault. They only tried. Hendrik Hertzberg:
Last year, Paul Ryan and Todd Akin were co-sponsors of a bill that would have specified a pregnancy resulting from "forcible rape" as the only kind that Medicaid or a health savings account could pay to end. A middle-school girl impregnated by her uncle or a sophomore coed subjected to the carnal aggressions of fraternity boys after a night of binge drinking would have to settle for the comfort that her rape, like the baby the G.O.P. would oblige her to have, was illegitimate.
I just scrolled over to the Power Line site and was greeted by the following headline over a post by John Hinderaker: "Are the Democrats Delusional on Abortion?" After Akin opened his craw, but before John composed that headline, the Republican party's platform committee voted to adopt the following language for its abortion plank: "Faithful to the 'self-evident' truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life that cannot be infringed."
Like I said, Akin is not an outlier. There is however a lot of evidence that he is delusional.
