I'm not arguing that. I didn't say that. I don't defend/explain the Bible or Christian beliefs, I am not a Christian. I merely stated that many Christian followers believe that whatever happens is God's will, good bad or ugly, it's God's will and part of his plan... that's what they believe as a matter of their religious faith, and that's where he is coming from.
Let's be completely honest, how many actual rapes result in pregnancy? What percentage of abortions is this? Do we have some secret epidemic of this sort of thing that I am unaware of? Because I just don't think it's that big of a deal. I don't agree with his viewpoint, I am not endorsing his viewpoint, but it doesn't have beans to do with the national GOP or Republicans. It doesn't affect policy, it can't and won't ever be made law of the land, and so it simply doesn't matter what his personal viewpoint is. He IS, however, entitled to exercise his religion in America, and this is part of that.
Melisa Holmes, an ob-gyn in South Carolina, led a study on pregnancies from rape through the National Crime Victims Center. Holmes's study, which was published in 1996, found that 5 percent of rapes in females of reproductive age resulted in pregnancy, amounting to an estimated 32,101 rape-related pregnancies per year in the U.S. Even that astounding number was a "significant underestimation," she says, because so many rapes go unreported.
More recently, in 2003, husband-and-wife team Jonathan and Tiffani Gottschall, then at St. Lawrence University, identified even higher rape-related pregnancy rates. Analyzing survey results from 8,000 women around the country, they determined that 6.4 percent of rapes in women of childbearing age resulted in pregnancy. In cases where no birth control was used, the rate increased to 8 percent.
Meanwhile, a CDC report released last November concluded that 1 in 5 women have been raped, with 1.3 million women age 18 and up raped in 2010 alone. Doing the math, allowing for the use of birth control, and only including adults, the most recent data suggests that more than 83,000 women became pregnant by a man who raped them in 2010.
Jonathan Gottschall recognizes that there's some "squishiness" in all of these numbers because they're based on self-reported data. Still, he says, "the available data give us no reason to think that conception from rape is rare, or even that it is less rare than conception from consensual intercourse. If anything, the data suggest that things go the other way around." Indeed, a 2001 study out of Princeton and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences found the rate of pregnancy from consensual, unprotected sex to be just 3.1 percent.
Rapists subsconsciously target victims based on their likelihood of conception.No one is sure why forced sex is statistically a more successful reproductive strategy than consensual sex. "We think it might be because rapists tend to target young women at peak fertility," Gottschall says. Holmes confirms that most rapes occur in women under 25, and pre-pubescent girls, post-menopausal women and visibly pregnant women are statistically underrepresented among female rape victims, according to Gordon Gallup, an evolutionary psychologist at SUNY-Albany who wrote about rape-related pregnancy in The Oxford Handbook of Sexual Conflict in Humans.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-08/rape-results-more-pregnancies-not-less
