Rick Santorum Is Gross

[Trigger warning for sexual violence; body policing; misogyny.]

Rick Santorum, on his extreme abortion views, at the Republican Debate last night:

Moderator: Our next question is for Senator Santorum: In June, you said, quote, "I believe that any doctor who performs an abortion should be criminally charged for doing so." You would allow no exceptions for cases of rape and incest. [Santorum nods.] Polls have long shown that large majorities of Americans support at least some exceptions for abortion. Are your views too much even for many conservatives to support?

Santorum: You know, the Supreme Court of the Unites States, on a recent case, said that a man who committed rape could not be killed, would not be subject to the death penalty—yet the child [sic] conceived as a result of that rape could be. That to me sounds like a country that doesn't have its morals correct. That child [sic] did nothing wrong. That child [sic] is— [pauses for audience applause]. That child [sic] is an innocent victim. To be victimized twice would be a horrible thing.

It is an innocent human life. It is genetically human from the moment of conception—it is a human life—and we in America should be big enough to try to surround ourselves and help women in those terrible situations—they've been traumatized already! To put them through another trauma of an abortion I think is, uh, is too much to ask, and I so I would, I would just absolutely stand and say that ONE violence in enough!

Yes, Rick Santorum, to be victimized twice would be a horrible thing—and many women who get pregnant via rape consider being forced to carry to term a pregnancy caused by rape and bear their rapist's child a revictimization of their bodies. Which is why women have a choice. No pregnant rape survivor is required to get an abortion; and no pregnant rape survivor should be denied an abortion, either. And if you genuinely believed that to be victimized twice is a horrible thing, you would agree with me, you despicable, body-policing, misogynistic, hypocritical dipshit.

I have said before that I ardently believe, by virtue of what giving birth demands of the human body, the anti-choice position to be inherently violent. To take an anti-choice position in the case of a pregnancy resulting from rape is to turn the inherent violence up to 11.

Let me be blunt: Rick Santorum is suggesting that after a man violates my body without my consent, sticks his penis in my vagina without my consent, ejaculates into my body without my consent, impregnates me without my consent, that he, Rick Santorum, should then have the right to force me to submit my body for nine months to a pregnancy I do not want, force me to submit my body to all that pregnancy can entail, from morning sickness to milk-engorged breasts to stretch marks to potentially life-threatening complications, and then force me to push out a baby I did not consent to conceive through the same vagina that was raped nine months earlier, and then decide whether to parent my rapist's child or give up my child for adoption.

Which doesn't even take into consideration the financial cost of a pregnancy, nor the possible threat to my job, nor that I might have a husband, who would be obliged to raise my rapist's child with me, and about a million other things that are masked behind his casual grin as he suggests "let's rally behind women who are impregnated by rapists," as if a lack of support from misogynist shitbags is their primary reason for termination.

And he's worried about the double victimization of a fucking blastocyst.

The profundity of my contempt is cavernous.

[H/T to Steph Herold.]