Students for Life President Kristan Hawkins: "Rape prevents pregnancy"

This is who they want to make decisions about our bodies.

With research by Grace Haley

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One of the most striking things about the anti-abortion movement is how they never change—not really. Despite the shiny new slogans and shifting strategies, this new generation of activists are essentially the same ignorant misogynists we’ve been dealing with for decades.

And thanks to our researcher Grace Haley, Abortion, Every Day has one of the best examples of this that I’ve seen in a while: In an interview last month with “The Boom Clap Podcast,” Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins claimed that “sexual assault actually helps prevent a lot of pregnancies itself because of your body’s natural response.”

Yes, that’s right. Over a decade after former Missouri Representative Todd Akin said “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” the woman that conservatives have positioned as the future of the anti-abortion movement said the same exact shit.

Here’s the full quote:

“Surprisingly people tend to think that every woman who is a survivor of sexual assault gets pregnant, which is not true. About 5% of women who survive sexual assault get pregnant, and actually the horror of the sexual assault actually helps prevent a lot of pregnancies itself because your body’s natural response to this atrocity that’s happened.”

If you can stomach it, I’ve embedded the episode below. Her comments on rape and pregnancy come at about 50:40 mins into the show.

Also please remember that this is one of the groups trying to end access to abortion medication by using fake and mischaracterized data, and that they’ve recently petitioned the FDA to reverse approval of mifepristone using a false and bizarre claim that the medication is poisoning our groundwater. Students for Life also wants to make contraception illegal: they claim hormonal birth control is an abortifacient.

So we’ve always known that Hawkins’ grasp of science, biology and pregnancy is lacking—but this latest admission goes above and beyond. These are the people that conservatives want us to believe know best about our bodies. These are the ‘leaders’ that the anti-abortion movement wants to decide what kind of medication we can take and what kind of healthcare we can access.

They can’t be fucking serious.

Abortion, Every Day is relentlessly researching the anti-choice movement to ensure that they don’t get away with a single thing. Help us keep doing the kind of work you won’t find anywhere else: