Akin disgraced himself as a benighted zealot by blathering about “legitimate rape,” but it’s a mistake, I think, to focus one’s outrage on the trauma of rape and incest victims, on teen-age girls of severely limited mental capacity who are conned by predators, or on patients who have been told by their physicians that a full-term pregnancy may kill them. Forcing such women to bear a child violates their integrity in a barbaric fashion—it rapes them twice.

Judith Thurman on Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex,” Todd Akin, Paul Ryan, and the abortion debate: http://nyr.kr/SJtwrP