Here’s a fun John Baer original from 1988:
The odds that a woman who is raped will get pregnant are “one in millions and millions and millions,” said state Rep. Stephen Freind, R-Delaware County, the Legislature’s leading abortion foe [...]
In an abortion debate with Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union, Freind said, according to transcripts: “It is almost but not quite impossible to become pregnant on the basis of rape. The odds are one in millions and millions and millions. And there is a physical reason for that.
“Rape, obviously, is a traumatic experience. When that traumatic experience is undergone, a woman secretes a certain secretion, which has a tendency to kill sperm.”
Informed of Freind’s remarks, Dr. Luigi Mastroianni Jr., director of the division of human reproduction at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, said yesterday: “Boy, if I could find out what that (secretion) was, I’d use it as a contraceptive.”
Mastroianni, who is also a past president of the American Fertility Society, added, “There is no such secretion.”
He said Freind’s statements were “scientifically unfounded” and “reflect a lack of concern for women who have been victimized by rape” by dismissing the act as not having consequence.
