WASHINGTON – Earlier this week, Rep. Trent Franks (R-Az.), author of a new bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks without exceptions for rape, justified the measure by claiming that “the incidents of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.” Franks, who was subject to immediate and intense backlash over his comment, has changed tack since then, and now says that “we as Americans need to have a hard conversation—namely, what’s the positive impact of rape on our society?”
Franks—who has called President Obama an “enemy of Humanity” and argued that abortion is worse that slavery—explained in a blog post his most recent remarks. “Where I’m from, we’ve got a saying: ‘There’s two sides to every story.’ Now, nobody likes rape. But nobody likes going to the dentist, either—and clearly dentistry has positive effects on society. Just look at the mangled mouths our English friends if you don’t believe me.”
“Same goes for rape, I’d assume,” Franks continued, clarifying that he personally does not have all the answers. “I don’t know what the positive impacts are, off the top of my head—but I know there’s gotta be something. You really think God would invent rape if it wasn’t making somebody’s life better?”
Franks’s earlier comments, on the “very low” rate of pregnancy resulting from rape, were repudiated by The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), which estimates that 5 percent of rape victims become pregnant. Perhaps anticipating a similar retort, Franks expanded on his suggestion that “Americans need to look into how rape makes us stronger as a nation” by offering a few ways in which he argument may be true.
“I have it on good authority that such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jonas Salk were all conceived during rape,” Franks said in a press conference. “What would the world be like if they’d been aborted just because their mothers were raped?”
Rep. Franks held a second press conference twenty minutes later in which he apologized for the “factual mistakes” he’d made concerning the conception of Einstein, King, and Salk, and announced that he’d come up with a “bullet-proof” example to bolster his theory.
“I’m pretty darn sure that Mary didn’t consent beforehand to letting God put a baby in her,” Franks said. “Which, technically, makes Jesus the product of rape. And anything that gave us Jesus can’t be all bad, right?”
