SALON

Sunday, Oct 28, 2012 1:00 PM UTC

Todd Akin, right-wing hero

The Republican Senate candidate in Missouri doesn't just spew anti-abortion rhetoric, he acts on it

By , The American Prospect

Topics: Abortion, The American Prospect, Todd Akin, War on women, 2012 Elections, Women's Rights,

Todd Akin, right-wing hero
This article originally appeared on The American Prospect.

The American Prospect Todd Akin, the Republican challenger for Claire McCaskill’s U.S. Senate seat representing Missouri, has made himself a national figure so far this election season by declaring that women can’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape” and claiming that abortion clinics routinely perform abortions on women who aren’t actually pregnant. But what’s garnered less attention, until this week, has been Akin’s history of not just saying but also doing disturbing things. His history shows a lifelong dedication to a misogynist right-wing ideology that flirts with using force to get its way when persuasion fails.

Akin has friends in high places. He spent his time in Congress working with vice-presidential candidate and Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, with whom he crafted anti-choice legislation that would—surprise—redefine rape narrowly to eliminate many rapes that don’t involve overt violence to subdue the victim. This would better reflect Akin’s belief that many to most rapes are not “legitimate.” It’s tempting to imagine that radicals like Akin are outside the mainstream but, as I’ve written before, he and his ilk have come to control the party. So, who is Todd Akin?

It’s no secret that Akin used to be part of militant abortion groups that have lulled the public into calling them “protesters,” even though their tactics—taunting abortion-clinic patients and stalking providers in a threatening manner—are better described as harassment that verges on terrorism. We’ve grown to accept these ghouls who’ve become part of abortion-clinic scenery and who clearly long for the days when sexually disobedient women could be put in the stocks.

What’s faded from memory somewhat is how much worse they used to be, before a string of vicious murders and bombings in the 1990s caused Congress to pass federal legislation in 1994, signed by President Bill Clinton, that increases the penalties for using physical force to close clinics and scare patients away from getting abortions. Todd Akin “protested” in those days of extreme anti-choice militancy, and as the liberal research group People for the American Way has reported, was arrested in 1987 as part of a Mother’s Day attack on a St. Louis clinic, when militants tried to physically block patients from entering the clinic. (Celebrating Mother’s Day by trying to physically force childbirth on the unwilling sounds an awful like celebrating Labor Day by strike-breaking.) The Huffington Post revealed Tuesday that Akin had been arrested at least three previous times for criminal trespass in 1985 during invasions of abortion clinics, events that included screaming invective at patients and trying to block access to clinics.

Akin was caught on tape last year bragging to a right-wing group about his arrest, and when People for the American Way confronted him about it, he claimed he would fill them in on the details later. His campaign broke that promise, and little wonder why. The group’s researchers dug around and found that Akin associated with the Pro-Life Direct Action League and Whole Life Ministries, groups that used aggressive action aimed directly at private citizens as the mainstay of their activism.

As reported by Salon, Akin’s aggressive activities didn’t stop with his recorded attempts to force individual women to bear children by blocking access to abortion. Akin once publicly defended a friend who assaulted another woman at an abortion clinic. It was 1989, and Akin was campaigning for Congress and serving as a Missouri state representative. Using official state letterhead, Akin wrote a letter on behalf of the friend, Teresa Frank, who was convicted of battery for shoving another woman to the ground during a July action at an abortion clinic. The language he used further reveals his ugly, outdated view of women, even those he’s defending: “Teresa is a deeply sensitive and caring person,” he wrote, “but along with this, she is also one very frightened little girl.”

At the time, Frank was 41 years old, a mother, and a friend of Akin’s wife. But Akin’s is a worldview in which women don’t ever get to be full adults but are, at best, little girls. That persists even when he’s not accusing them of inventing rape to cover up for having consensual sex, or suggesting they’re so stupid that doctors routinely trick them into thinking they’re pregnant so they can perform unnecessary abortions on them. It’s easy to see how a man with such a low opinion of women convinced himself that he has the power and the right to physically stop them from exercising their reproductive rights. To him, women fall somewhere on the creation scale between small children and wild animals, and the only appropriate response is to exert control instead of letting them make up their own minds about their lives and their bodies.

After Clinton signed the law that attempted to squelch the rising tide of violence and harassment against abortion providers—activism that Akin participated in—seven clinic workers were murdered between 1993 and 1998, before the violence receded. In the past decade, only Dr. George Tiller, a doctor in Kansas who performed late-term abortions, was killed by such violence, in 2009. Most anti-abortion militants are limited to yelling invective or trying to shame women who want abortions by passive-aggressively praying at them. Most understand that aggressive actions can result in federal prosecutions. But as Akin’s continued pride in front of anti-choice audiences shows, this doesn’t mean the movement has abandoned the ideologies that justify the use of force to mandate that all pregnant women give birth. They’ve just learned to elect their warriors to political office, where they can use the government to exert the force that militants used to employ directly.

Read more of The American Prospect at http://www.prospect.org.

Continue Reading Close
Read more of The American Prospect at http://www.prospect.org.

Amanda Marcotte is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and journalist. She's published two books and blogs regularly at Pandagon, RH Reality Check and Slate's Double X. More Amanda Marcotte.

Next Article

Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

Related Videos

More Related Stories

Comments

 19 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

From Around the Web

Recommendations