EDITORIAL: Akin’s absurd rant working to bring the country back to its senses on women’s rights

Enlightenment is such a short-lived affair in this country sometimes.

Such is the case with rights for women, which right-wing lawmakers on the state and federal level have chiseled away at steadily for the past 20 years or so.

Despite the outrage caused by Missouri Congressman Todd Akin’s ludicrous comments last week about “legitimate” rape and magical anti-pregnancy biology, some good will come from this for all women.

It could well be that when Akin flubbed — not by misspeaking, as he claims, but by telling it as he saw it — Americans will see that the reproductive and medical privacy rights of American women have been dangerously eroded during the past several years, and could be even more so after this year’s elections.

After the tumultuous 1960s, it seemed that Americans finally understood that pregnancy, birth control and abortion were by nature and by law, issues of medical privacy. After generations of abuse, women were free from the misogynistic and religious control of their bodies, carried out by the U.S. government. It finally became clear that the issue of pregnancy is a medical one between a woman and her physician. Our bodies, including those of women, should never come under government regulation. It means that abortion is an issue of medical ethics, not one that the likes of Akin should ever have the power to impose on U.S. citizens.

Akin and his buffoonish beliefs have done a great service to those who have refused to give up the fight for women’s health and reproductive rights by revealing whom he has aligned himself with in Congress, and how uncomfortably close we have come to critically infringing on those important rights.

In Colorado, House Republicans, including Aurora Congressman Mike Coffman, have repeatedly sponsored that and similar measures. Thanks to Akin, the issue of women’s rights will likely be given renewed life during the upcoming federal and state elections.

The timing couldn’t be better. Once again, out-of-state interests have returned to Colorado to peddle a nonsensical anti-abortion initiative dubbed “personhood.”

If this sounds familiar, it is. Colorado voters have twice trounced this notion by large margins.

It’s a dangerous and misguided idea that gives constitutional rights to sperm-and-egg combinations.

The notion that a person is created each and every time a human egg is fertilized is as absurd as endowing constitutional rights to female ovaries themselves or uterine cells. While all life, and especially human life, is a complex marvel, it’s no longer a stupefying mystery. Fertilized human eggs are easily created. But for a fertilized egg to become even the precursor to a baby depends on a complicated series of events and conditions. While scientists don’t agree on the exact rate of fertilized human eggs coming to term, they agree that most fertilized eggs exist for only a couple of weeks.

These gaggles of cells aren’t recognizable as people under any scientific or legal scrutiny. Despite that hard science, many simply don’t understand it or try and simply ignore it. That’s the Akin way, trying to persuade others that women’s uteruses can magically prevent a pregnancy from some types of rape.

Akin and those seeking to steal women’s rights have brought fresh, much-needed attention to the issue and made it clearer than ever that the government has no business in the examining room and no business regulating issues of medical privacy.