Once again, a member of the GOP has regurgitated a bizarre falsehood about rape. Celeste Greig, the head of the California Republican Assembly, the largest GOP volunteer organization in California, said in a newspaper interview that rape almost never leads to pregnancies because the body is too traumatized.
“Granted, the percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it’s an act of violence, because the body is traumatized. I don’t know what percentage of pregnancies are due to the violence of rape. Because of the trauma the body goes through,” she told the newspaper just before her arrival at the state GOP’s spring convention in Sacramento.
Interestingly, the subject was brought up while Greig was criticizing Rep. Todd Akin, who gained infamy for saying women’s bodies have a way of rejecting unwanted semen when deposited forcefully.” “That was an insensitive remark,” Greig said. “I’m sure he regretted it. He should have come back and apologized.”
But bizarrely, Grieg went on to double down on Akin’s disastrous comments.
The atrocities of rape and incest have long been a thorn in the side of the pro-life movement, since they provide two powerful moral arguments for keeping abortion legal. The boldness these groups have shown when it comes to manufacturing false science to tilt this moral balance has become more prevalent in the past two election cycles.
Greig’s remark drew an immediate backlash from California Democrats. “It’s just outrageous, beyond absurd. It’s insulting. It’s the same line of thinking of ‘If we just dress differently, or behave differently, we won’t be raped.’ They’re basically saying ‘while we’re being raped, if we hate it enough we won’t get pregnant,’” Democratic Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner of Berkeley told the newspaper.
Republican strategists have very publicly warned their fellow GOPers to stop talking about rape in regards to the abortion debate, but since much of the GOP’s rationale for opposing abortion is disseminated from the religious right, it seems this narrative will be around for a while.
Greig also created controversy for herself when in 2011, she was a guest on the American Family Association’s radio show and railed against Spanish-speaking residents in California, saying that the Pledge of Allegiance should not be translated into Spanish and that California children were being “indoctrinated” in a “socialist state.”
See Greig’s comments to the American Family Association in the video below.
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