Bryan Fischer is the type of person who doesn’t believe that HIV causes AIDS, but rather that the disease is caused by gay men taking “poppers” in order “to make it possible to have numerous encounters on the same night.”
So when Rep. Todd Akin set off a firestorm of controversy by saying that women have a biological defense against pregnancy in the case of “legitimate rape,” it was no surprise that Fischer was one of Akin’s earliest and most vocal defenders, declaring that Akin is “absolutely right.”
In fact, Fischer dedicated much of his program yesterday to defending Akin, even bringing on Brad Mattes of Life Issues Institute to explain the various reasons why instances of women becoming pregnant via rape are extremely rare, such as women are only capable of conception for a few days every month, lots of women take contraception, lots of women and even rapists are sterile, and in many cases there is no penetration or deposition of sperm.
On top of that, Mattes explained, there is “a great deal of anxiety and hormones being released that would prevent [a victim] from becoming pregnant,” which is why fertility specialists recommend to women who are trying to get pregnant to reduce the stress in their life.
“So it really all stands to reason,” Mattes claimed, before he and Fischer went on to praise Todd Akin for having always been a staunch anti-choice zealot whose ascension to the Senate would be a huge boost to the movement and lamented that Republicans are “throwing him under the bus” instead of holding him up and “helping him weather this storm and controversy”:
