But an amazing amount of political energy is still spent propping up the fiction that men should have a say.
The following is an excerpt from the new book Asking For It: Slut-shaming, Victim-blaming and How We Can Change America's Rape Culture by Kate Harding (Da Capo, 2015):
I don’t want to write about the abortion debate (right now, anyway), and you presumably didn’t expect to read about it when you clicked on an article on rape culture.
You might even agree with me that rape culture is real and terrible, while vehemently disagreeing with me on reproductive rights (I’m for ’em). One of the most surprising things I’ve observed as a liberal feminist writing publicly about sexual assault is that this issue can sometimes unite people like me with the staunchest conservatives. When I wrote a piece for Salon—not exactly a right-wing publication—criticizing the journalists, actors, and ordinary citizens who came out in support of Roman Polanski after his arrest in 2009, I was quoted approvingly not only by feminist blogs but by the Wall Street Journal and even the far-right-wing tabloid World Net Daily.
After a couple days of unaccountably fawning Polanski coverage, people of every political persuasion were relieved to hear someone say, “Hey, wait a minute, didn’t this guy rape a kid and flee the country to avoid sentencing? Are we really supposed to see him as some kind of victim?” Of course, it only needed to be said because so many people of every political persuasion were coming to his defense, trying to minimize or erase the fact that he had pled guilty to drugging and then vaginally and anally penetrating a thirteen-year-old girl in 1977. But for a brief, shining moment there, I was a darling of the right, the left, and everyone in between who claimed membership on Team Wait a Minute, This Is Really Fucked Up, You Guys. It was so nice to agree on at least one thing!
That’s never going to happen with abortion.
But I can’t bring up the subject of politicians and rape without talking about reproductive justice, because our elected officials keep intertwining the issues. It’s not just that both rape and severe abortion restrictions spring from the same fear of women’s sexual autonomy, although they do. Nor is it just that antiwoman politicians sometimes go as far as stripping funding from rape crisis centers if they offer information about abortion.1 It’s that the (mostly older, white, male) politicians who keep trying to effectively overturn Roe v. Wade by legislating increasingly severe abortion restrictions are inevitably asked if they support exceptions for women who become pregnant through rape or incest. And then they answer those questions, out loud, and it’s all downhill from there.
Legitimate, Emergency, Honest, Forcible Rape-Rape: Could It Be God’s Plan for You?
Previously unknown Missouri representative Todd Akin became the most famous of these in August 2012, when he shared his scientific understanding of conception: “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has a way of shutting that whole thing down.” That single sentence is breathtaking in its ignorance of basic biology—if sperm meets egg, pregnancy can occur—and of forty years of scholarship and activism that’s sought to disabuse Americans of the notion that distinctions like “legitimate rape” are anything other than misogynistic bullshit.
Akin’s hardly alone. In the last few years, several American politicians—mostly focused on restricting or removing rape exceptions from antiabortion policy—have given us a host of awkward phrases that reveal how they think about sexual assault, and it ain’t pretty.
In 2011, 214 Republicans sponsored a bill, the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, which specified that exceptions would only be allowed for victims of “forcible rape”—just to make sure no shifty women were getting away with abortion after gentle and well-meaning rapes. (To be fair, it was only in 2013 that the word “forcible” was struck from the definition of rape in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program.) Then there was presidential candidate–cum–OB/GYN Ron Paul’s advice, in February 2012, for sexual assault victims concerned about pregnancy: “If it’s an honest rape, that individual should go immediately to the emergency room, I would give them a shot of estrogen.”
We’d barely had time to recover from that when Todd Akin hit us with the “legitimate rape” doozy, followed by Connecticut Republican senate candidate Linda McMahon’s clumsy attempt at walking back her support of Catholic hospitals that refuse to provide emergency contraception: “It was really an issue about a Catholic church being forced to offer those pills if the person came in in an emergency rape.” (If a rape victim showed up at a Catholic church, I certainly hope someone there would get her to a hospital.)
And then there was Indiana Republican senate candidate Richard Mourdock, who said—again, out loud, with people listening—“I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” This sentiment was shared by former GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who told Piers Morgan, “I believe and I think that the right approach is to accept this horribly created, in the sense of rape, but nevertheless, in a very broken way, a gift of human life, and accept what God is giving to you.” Hey, there, mortal. Sorry about the rape thing—my bad—but please accept this unwanted pregnancy as a token of my esteem. Love, God.
Eventually, the president of the United States ended up on The Tonight Show, reassuring the American public that at least one elected official isn’t an ignorant sexist. “Let me make a very simple proposition,” said President Obama. “Rape is rape. It is a crime. And so these various distinctions about rape don’t make too much sense to me—don’t make any sense to me.”
Tell me about it.
Forcible rape. Honest rape. Legitimate rape. Emergency rape.These qualifiers call to mind Whoopi Goldberg’s now-famous reaction to the news of Polanski’s arrest: “I know it wasn’t rape-rape. It was something else, but I don’t believe it was rape-rape.”
Goldberg took a lot of flack for that inelegant turn of phrase, but without a doubt she was only expressing what many Americans—some of them in public office—believe down deep: there’s rape, and then there’s rape-rape. Women who are rape-raped don’t deserve to be punished with forty weeks of incubating the product of that assault, followed by the most physically painful experience known to human beings, which also happens to kill several hundred women a year in the United States and causes severe, life-threatening complications in over fifty thousand more. And that’s before you have to either give the baby up for adoption or raise your rapist’s child. But women who were merely “raped”? Yeah, they should probably have to endure all that.
How the Antiabortion Movement Got It So Wrong
Akin and his buddies are not only insinuating that the thirty-thousand-plus grown American women who become pregnant as a result of rape every year were asking for it, mind you. They’re also indirectly blaming twelve- and fourteen-year-olds impregnated by their fathers and uncles. They’re suggesting that child victims like Jaycee Dugard and Amanda Berry, who had children by men who abducted them and held them captive for years, weren’t victims of legitimate rape. Nor were slave women who had white male politicians’ children, apparently.
According to the GOP’s finest, ovulating around the time of your rape is sufficient evidence that you’re a liar, not a victim. These geniuses have basically created a seventeenth-century-Salem standard for abortion eligibility: if you’d been legitimately raped, your Super-Secret Cervix Shield would have activated when it detected the presence of unsolicited ejaculate. The fact that you got pregnant proves you don’t deserve to end that pregnancy. (But if you drown, you were innocent, and your reward will be in heaven. I think that’s how it works.)
You know, I’m not even saying we couldn’t, in theory, have evolved physical mechanisms in our ladybusiness to prevent pregnancy from rape. Ducks have! Male ducks have corkscrew-shaped penises and a shocking propensity for rape—apparently, at least a third of sexual encounters between ducks are forcible. But in response, female ducks have developed “cryptic” vaginas that corkscrew in the opposite direction, and extra pathways that lure sperm to a dead end. The result is that only about 2 percent of duck babies are thought to have fathers the moms didn’t choose. Duck bodies are amazing! But human bodies do not have such a mechanism. And it’s religion, not science driving the erroneous claims that they do.
In the wake of all these so-called gaffes, journalists like Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post and Garance Franke-Ruta of the Atlantic identified the work of John Willke, MD, as a likely source for much of the current misunderstanding about pregnancy and rape. Willke, a onetime obstetrician and founder of the International Right to Life Federation, first published these ideas in a 1971 Handbook on Abortion coauthored with his wife, Barbara. According to the Associated Press, “The book became an instant touchstone for the anti-abortion movement, selling 1.5 million copies at the height of the sexual revolution.”
In a 1999 essay published in Christian Life Resources and beloved by conservative opponents of abortion, Willke argued that the emotional trauma of “assault rape”—again, distinguishing the bad kind of rape from the good is a priority among this crowd—could prevent ovulation. In a 2012 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he reiterated this belief and pronounced it “downright unusual” for a woman to become pregnant by rape, guessing the instance to be “one or two” in a thousand.
(It’s more like fifty in a thousand, but who’s counting?)
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued a scathing statement in response to Akin’s regurgitation of Willke’s stunningly incorrect assessment, which read, in part:
Each year in the US, 10,000–15,000 abortions occur among women whose pregnancies are a result of reported rape or incest. An unknown number of pregnancies resulting from rape are carried to term. There is absolutely no veracity to the claim that “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down.” A woman who is raped has no control over ovulation, fertilization, or implantation of a fertilized egg (i.e., pregnancy). To suggest otherwise contradicts basic biological truths.
Any person forced to submit to sexual intercourse against his or her will is the victim of rape, a heinous crime. There are no varying degrees of rape. To suggest otherwise is inaccurate and insulting and minimizes the serious physical and psychological repercussions for all victims of rape.
Inaccurate, insulting, and in contradiction of basic biological truths: that about sums it up. But one suspects the scientific facts are lost on people who believe God chooses some women not only to be raped but to carry their rapists’ children.
The Built-In Polygraph
Contrary to the idea of the Super-Secret Cervix Shield, there’s actually some scientific evidence that women’s bodies may be designed to facilitate rape, in a manner of speaking. Not because we “want it,” but because our genes have a better chance of surviving if we don’t succumb to massive infections, like the ones that might follow having our vaginas torn up.
In the early 2000s, researchers at Northwestern University measured physical sexual responses like erection in men and lubrication in women as both genders watched three kinds of porn: straight, gay, and bonobo chimp. Regardless of sexuality, the men generally became physically aroused when watching the porn that aligned with their self-reported orientation—and none of them got off on the chimp sex. Women, however, lubed up for all of it. (Disclosure: one of those researchers, Dr. Meredith Chivers, is a friend who first told me about this study over drinks in my backyard.)
The researchers theorized that this could have evolved as a protective measure for women; if we can only self-lubricate when mentally aroused, we’re vulnerable to far more physical damage from rape. (Or, presumably, from really boring sex.) But pre-antibiotic rape victims who lubricated at the first sign of sex would be less likely to die of an internal wound gone septic.
When the New York Times reported on this study in 2007, there was a fair bit of outrage in feminist circles, because lots of people interpreted it as implying that women secretly want to be raped. In fact, though, it implies that there’s a significant difference between lubricating automatically and being genuinely turned on. That’s actually a useful piece of information for resisting rape culture.
Consider: among the many delightful bon mots Steubenville High alum Michael Nodianos offered up while watching Jane Doe’s assault was, “Her puss is about as dry as the sun right now.” Watching the “dead girl” suffer various violations, he correctly gathered that she was not an enthusiastic participant—but whether that extended to a lack of lubrication is another matter. The fact is, we (mercifully) have no idea about that, and it’s completely irrelevant to whether she was raped—which is a question of consent, not physiological minutiae.
But this belief that the female body serves as its own polygraph, confirming or contradicting whatever the female mouth is claiming about consent, is equally pernicious and pervasive. Victims are still suspected of lying if their vulvas aren’t visibly shredded after a rape.
In 2008, California superior court judge Derek Johnson told the court at a convicted rapist’s sentencing, “I’m not a gynecologist, but I can tell you something. If someone doesn’t want to have sexual intercourse, the body shuts down. The body will not permit that to happen unless a lot of damage is inflicted, and we heard nothing about that in this case. That tells me that the victim in this case, although she wasn’t necessarily willing, she didn’t put up a fight.”
Setting aside the fact that “not necessarily willing” is in fact the definition of nonconsent, no kidding that he’s not a gynecologist!
On the other hand, Representative Phil Gingrey of Marietta, Georgia, is one (just like Ron Paul and John Willke), and that didn’t stop him from backing up Akin’s bad science. During a Smyrna Area Chamber of Commerce meeting, Dr. Gingrey opined, “In a situation of rape, a legitimate rape, a woman’s body has a way of shutting down so the pregnancy would not occur. [Akin’s] partly right on that.”
Moments later, by way of explaining how Akin was also partly wrong, Gingrey directly contradicted himself: “But the fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you’re not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman’s body shutting anything down because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak.”
In other words, it’s a biological fact that a woman can become pregnant from a rape considered “legitimate” by disgusting old men—or by any other intercourse that happens at the right time in her cycle. But let’s not let the actual biological facts stand in the way of a good story.
It’s not hard to see why this falsehood is so seductive. If every vagina could intuit the difference between consensual and nonconsensual sex, then we might have more ways of distinguishing rape from nonrape that don’t require listening to a woman’s own account of what happened. Nebulous vagina magic isn’t quite as reliable as, say, noses that grow whenever women lie, but it’s something to help reasonable people know who’s a real victim and who’s just “crying rape.” And that’s such a useful concept, the fact that it’s imaginary hardly seems reason enough to abandon it.
“Crime Has Consequences”
When we refuse to acknowledge that a victim’s testimony is legitimate evidence—perhaps not enough to send someone to prison on its own, but a good reason to suspect a crime has really occurred—we treat victims like criminals. If we believe that any given police report of rape stands a good chance of being false, when we know only a small minority actually are, we establish a habit of treating women as complicit in crimes committed against them.
Washington state’s John Koster, who ran for Congress in 2012, gave us a perfect example of how this works. When asked about abortion exceptions for rape or incest, he replied:
Incest is so rare, I mean, it’s so rare. But, uh, the rape thing—You know, I know a woman who was raped and kept her child, gave it up for adoption. She doesn’t regret it. In fact, she’s a—she’s a big pro-life proponent. But, on the rape thing, it’s like, how does—how does putting more violence onto a woman’s body and taking the life of an innocent child that’s not—that’s a consequence of this crime, how does that make it better? You know what I mean?
The interviewer then says, “Yeah, but she has to live with the consequence of that crime,” to which Koster replies, “Well, you know. Crime has consequences.”
Crime has consequences. Crime has consequences. That’s what you say to a teenager who got busted for shoplifting, not to a victim of a violent assault.
Seriously, imagine he was talking about anything but rape there. “Don’t feel safe in your own home since it was burglarized? Well, you know. Crime has consequences.” “Haven’t been able to sleep since you were mugged at gunpoint? Crime has consequences.” “In terrible pain since someone beat the shit out of you? Crime has consequences.” “Dead now, because someone murdered you? Crime has consequences, young lady. You probably should have thought of that.”
It’s not some kind of slip or gaffe. All of this hedging about “the rape thing” goes back to the wrongheaded and dangerous belief that an enormous number of women who report rape are, in fact, guilty of a crime—not just the “sin” of premarital sex but the actual crime of filing a false report. People like this presume that there’s a fifty-fifty chance (at least) that any woman who goes to police and says, “I was raped,” is herself breaking the law—so all alleged victims must be investigated thoroughly on suspicion of that crime.
Combine that with a strong religious belief that (a) premarital sex warrants punishment and (b) a woman’s highest purpose is motherhood, and of course it makes sense to tell a pregnant rape victim, “Well, you know. Crime has consequences.” She probably did something wrong anyway, and her only problem is that now she has to do what she was put on earth to do.
In that worldview, genuine rape is so rare, it’s “small ball” (Republican political strategist Ron Christie), and talking about it is “an unfortunate distraction from the issues that matter” (Texas senator Ted Cruz). But women “crying rape” because they’re embarrassed to admit they had sex, or because they’re angry at a man they had consensual sex with (and downright evil enough to have him investigated for rape as revenge), well, that stuff happens all the time. Because: Women. You know how they are.
Crime has consequences. So do elections, fortunately—Koster did not win the seat he ran for. But he gave us a classic example of how the Republican party in the twenty-first century thinks about women. We’re moral and emotional children, prone to lying, cruelty, and acting without thinking. We have casual sex, then casually terminate the resulting pregnancies, because we just don’t quite understand where babies come from. (And if we’re feeling cranky, we might even accuse the fathers of our aborted fetuses of raping us, just to watch them squirm.)
To be fair, it’s not clear that women in the Republican Party understand the biological basics of reproduction, either. During a June 2013 debate on a proposed, highly restrictive abortion ban, Texas representative Jodie Laubenberg—a cosponsor of the bill—said she opposed exceptions for rape or incest because emergency rooms typically offer “what’s called rape kits where a woman can get cleaned out, basically like a D and C.”
A D and C—dilation of the cervix and curettage, or scraping, of the uterus—is one kind of abortion procedure, but it has precisely nothing to do with a rape kit, the colloquial name for evidence collected in a medical setting after a sexual assault. In her attempts to clarify the statement later, Laubenberg said she momentarily confused “rape kit” with emergency contraception sometimes offered to rape victims in emergency rooms, but that, too, has nothing to do with a D and C. The “morning-after pill” is a high dose of estrogen taken within a few days of unprotected intercourse, which interferes with ovulation.
These are your elected officials, ladies and gentlemen. They literally do not know how babies are made (or aren’t made, as the case may be), but they’re sure rape victims can’t get pregnant, abortion is precisely equivalent to murder, emergency room doctors can “clean women out,” and half the world’s population are lying, scheming jezebels.
Again, there’s a reason why I went so far into the weeds of abortion here. Let’s not get so distracted by Laubenberg’s staggering ignorance that we forget her actual position: because emergency contraception is available at hospitals, no rape or incest exception is necessary in a law about when and how people may access abortion.
The implication is obvious: “legitimate” rape victims immediately seek medical attention. If a woman never went to the hospital, how do we know she wasreally raped when she comes waltzing in, looking for the abortion care she’s supposedly had a constitutional right to since 1973? How do we know she’s not just saying she was raped because she regrets having sex?
Oh, look. There we are again.
Spousal Rape and Parental Rights
It’s bad enough that so many legislators believe women should be forced to bear the children of rape, but wait—it gets worse! In most states, the rapist can then assert his parental rights.
Only nineteen states have any laws attempting to prevent a victim having to share custody with her rapist, and according to Mother Jones reporters Dana Liebelson and Sydney Brownstone, among those:
13 require proof of conviction in order to waive the rapist’s parental rights. Two more states have provisions on the issue that only apply if the victim is a minor or, in one of those cases, a stepchild or adopted child of the rapist. Another three states don’t have laws that deal with custody of a rapist’s child specifically, but do restrict the parental rights of a father or mother who sexually abused the other parent.
If your first thought is, “But realistically, what rapist would want to be a daddy?” you’re forgetting that most rapists know their victims, and plenty of them are spouses or domestic partners. There is a clear correlation between intimate partner violence in heterosexual couples and unintended pregnancy, for starters. In a study published in a 2010 issue of the journal Contraception, the researchers write:
One specific element of abusive men’s control that may, in part, explain the association is overt pregnancy coercion and direct interference with contraception. Some males use verbal demands, threats and physical violence to pressure their female partners to become pregnant. Reproductive control may also take the form of direct acts that ensure a woman cannot use contraception—birth control sabotage—including flushing birth control pills down the toilet, intentional breaking of condoms, and removing contraceptive rings or patches.
In a survey of 1,278 women who sought services at one of five California family planning clinics, these researchers found that 53 percent had been victims of intimate partner violence, and among those, 19 percent had experienced pregnancy coercion, and 15 percent, birth control sabotage. And 40 percent reported at least one unintended pregnancy.
So we know that some abusive men will go to great lengths to get their partners pregnant (thus making it that much harder for the women to leave). We know that some of those use “threats and physical violence” to get the pregnancy they’re after. Thanks to the CDC’s 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, we know that more than one in three abused female respondents “experienced multiple forms of rape, stalking, or physical violence,” and that over the course of a lifetime, nearly one in ten women in the United States will be raped by an intimate partner.
In light of all that, does it seem so far-fetched that a man would rape a woman and want to raise a child that resulted from his crime? That he’d want to control her with a lifelong tie and rub her face in what he’s managed to get away with? Would it surprise you if a rapist saw fatherhood primarily as an opportunity to raise the emotional stakes, to create a bargaining chip even more precious to his victim than her own life? Or if he just got off on the idea of controllingtwo people?
It sure shouldn’t. But again, rape myths cloud our ability to consider scenarios like this. Spousal rape has only been illegal in all fifty states since 1993, because it took that long to convince enough legislators that it really happens, and it’s really a crime.
Seventeenth-century English jurist Matthew Hale—famous for his oft-invoked warning that “rape is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused”—also wrote, “The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract, the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract.”
Until the late twentieth century, when feminist agitation for the reform of rape laws finally began to penetrate our nation’s collective thick skull, Hale’s three-hundred-year-old notions remained the standard. The marriage contract automatically included sex on demand, regardless of the wife’s feelings at any given time. The idea of consenting to unlimited future sex, without restrictions, should strike any reasonable person as absurd; consent can only be freely given if the opportunity to withdraw it exists. But when you consider how long Hale’s pronouncements held sway in US and British courts, you begin to see why so many of us have ass-backward ideas about what it means.
The unfortunate result of that widespread ignorance is not only that we still imagine “real” rapists jumping out of the bushes, or hiding in dark alleys, but that we still regard the crime as especially repugnant because it involves dirty, shameful genitals and can rob a “pure” woman of her virtue. A lot of lawmakers were still stuck on that point well into the twenty-first century. “Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was,” said Tennessee state senator Douglas Henry in 2008. “Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman, against her will, by some party not her spouse. Today it’s simply, ‘Let’s don’t go forward with this act.’”
Yes, exactly! Human beings have a right to say, “Let’s don’t go forward with this act,” and have their wishes respected, even if they’re not “chaste,” and even if they’re married to the person who does want to go forward with the act in question. That’s both what the law says in every state of the union and what any sensible person would call a simple truth—an iteration of the golden fucking rule. But not Douglas Henry.
And not South Dakota state senator Bill Napoli, who, when asked to describe a scenario in which allowing someone to terminate a pregnancy would be a valid option, said, “A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.”
But if she wasn’t a virgin? Wasn’t religious? Didn’t plan on saving herself? If she wasn’t “brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it”? (I shudder to think what that even means.) Well, then, I guess one can only conclude she was asking for it.
The Power of the Vote
Impeachment might have a certain appeal, but as I said in chapter 6, using your vote in every election is the number one thing you can do to keep ignorant clowns out of office. Campaign for their opponents. Support leaders who prioritize women’s health and safety—and recognize that those who want government control of female fertility do not prioritize women’s health and safety.
The thinking behind the admonition “If she doesn’t want to get pregnant, she shouldn’t spread her legs” is exactly what drives people to blame rape victims for wearing provocative clothing, drinking heavily, or having any sexual history at all. The common denominator is a woman who wants to be sexual on her own terms without being punished for it, who wants the power to say both yes and no as freely as a man can.
That’s pretty much all of us, if you had any doubt: 95 percent of American women have had premarital sex by the age of forty-four. Even by age twenty, three-quarters of Americans have had sex, while only 12 percent have married. Additionally, 99 percent of sexually active women between fifteen and forty-four have at some point used contraception. The average woman hopes to have only two children in that whole adult lifetime of having sex.
So in case you hadn’t already figured this out via common sense, the data is conclusive: women desire sex, seek it out, and have it, even when they don’t want to become pregnant. If you’re a grown man who somehow still doesn’t grasp this concept, ask yourself two questions:
1. Have I ever felt the urge to have sex for fun, without causing massive, potentially life-threatening changes to my body, followed by parenthood?
2. If at some point I didn’t feel like having sex with someone, would I want that person to respect my opinion on the matter and cease trying to have sex with me?
If you answered yes to both questions, congratulations! You know exactly what it’s like to be a grown woman. Nevertheless, an amazing amount of political energy is still—in the twenty-first century—spent propping up the fiction that women need male supervision to make decisions about their sexual activity and fertility.
“Recent rollbacks of women’s political rights—especially reproductive rights—stem directly from the belief that women shouldn’t have control over their own bodies,” writes feminist author Jessica Valenti in The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women. “More and more, policy that affects women’s bodies and rights is being formulated with the myth of sexual purity in mind.”
Enough is enough. Whether we’re talking about access to legal abortion or the definition of “legitimate rape,” the fundamental question is: Who gets to decide when, where, and why a woman has sex?
There is only one correct answer, and any politician who needs more than two seconds to come up with it does not deserve your vote.
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