Todd Akin is back.
The former Missouri Republican congressman – who notoriously argued during his failed 2012 Senate bid that victims of “legitimate rape” rarely get pregnant—is doubling down on his infamous remarks, in addition to calling Hillary Clinton a hypocrite for defending an alleged rapist in 1975.
During an interview with The Daily Mail published Thursday, Akin said Clinton – the early front-runner to be the party’s standard bearer in 2016 – “has made a practice of trashing women with legitimate claims to having been assaulted.”
Akin was referring to a 1980s audio interview published earlier this month by The Washington Free Beacon, in which Clinton discussed her defense of a man accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. In the recordings, Clinton is heard laughing while she talks about getting her client a lighter sentence, despite suggesting she knew he was to blame.
Akin, who has a book coming out soon, told The Daily Mail that “it is incredibly hypocritical that Hillary Clinton would carry on about an imagined ‘Republican war on women’ when she once got a child rapist off the hook who she knew to be guilty.”
According to The Daily Mail, Akin, in his book, also defends himself over his “legitimate rape” remark. “My comment about a woman’s body shutting the pregnancy down was directed to the impact of stress on fertilization. This is something fertility doctors debate and discuss. Doubt me? Google ‘stress and fertilization,’ and you will find a library of research on the subject,” he writes, according to the report. “The research is not conclusive, but there is considerable evidence that stress makes conception more difficult. And what could be more stressful than a rape?’ Akin also said he has not ruled out the possibility of again running for office again in the future.Recommended
