At a hearing today on his bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy without exception, Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona said he opposed adding a rape exception to the bill in part because “the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.”
Franks added, nonsensically, “But when you make that exception, there’s usually a requirement to report the rape within 48 hours. And in this case that’s impossible because this is in the sixth month of gestation. And that’s what completely negates and vitiates the purpose of such an amendment.”
Franks’ misinformed, Todd Akin-like comments on the mechanics of pregnancy are just the latest in a long line of extreme anti-choice positions.
- Franks was the main sponsor of last year’s “Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act,” a bill to ban abortions based on the gender or race of the fetus – a law that would have been basically impossible to enforce, and instead was meant to intimidate medical professionals and women of color seeking abortions. Franks has argued that African Americans were better off under slavery than with legal abortion and that a “racist abortion policy” is committing genocide against African Americans.
- Franks claimed earlier this month that failure to pass his 20-week abortion bill would “send America over the brink” and that Roe v. Wade will fall like the Soviet Union.
- He also recently compared the anti-choice movement to the abolition of slavery and the liberation of concentration camps.
- Franks called President Obama an “enemy of humanity,” later trying to explain that he meant to call Obama an “enemy of unborn humanity.”
- He refused to let Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s nonvoting representative in Congress, speak at a hearing on his bill to ban abortions in D.C. after 20 weeks.
Aside from his anti-choice activism, Franks pushes anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, has flirted with birtherism, and has claimed that marriage equality is a “threat to the nation’s survival.”
