[TW: discussion violence against women, rape, preeclampsia and miscarriages]

I struggle to see anything adaptive in this. I struggle to see any benefit that could outweigh this cost.

Finally, most perpetrators today are men the victims know. Many, many rapes are part of a broader suite of intimate partner violence behaviors. The idea that preeclampsia could somehow be a pregnancy avoidance mechanism assumes that the rapist is not the woman’s partner, has not in fact had sex, consensual or not, with her for a number of years. It seems likely to me that the kinds of rape we have today are similar to the kinds of rape we had in the ancestral period.

The science behind all of this is straightforward. Akin could have had some assistant or intern look it up in minutes via Google Scholar or PubMed, as a few paper abstracts would have been more illuminating than whatever he was reading. But Akin wasn’t interested in the science, he was interested in how well he could use fear and false information to control women.

In all that powerlessness, that is one thing women have to fight back. When women have the right information they do not have to withstand the claim that they can’t get pregnant from rape, or it must not have been that stressful if they are pregnant. Women and their children who have survived preeclampsia do not have to endure another man telling them that it is a mechanism to avoid rape, or that they could reduce their chances of preeclampsia next time if they’d only swallow. A clear picture of reality dispels the gloom of sexism better than any cleverly worded blog post ever could.