From REUTERS:
…”Mental stress can temporarily alter the functioning of your hypothalamus – an area of your brain that controls the hormones that regulate your menstrual cycle,” explains the Mayo Clinic in a publication about infertility. “Ovulation and menstruation may stop as a result.”
But the stress that reduces fertility is the chronic kind that occurs over months or years, not the acute trauma of a rape.
“A woman who is raped at a vulnerable time in her menstrual cycle is as likely to conceive and retain a pregnancy as a woman who was voluntarily attempting pregnancy,” said ACOG’s Levy. “There’s absolutely no validity to any sort of theory that the trauma related to rape – or to any thing else for that matter – would shut down ovulation that has already begun.”
Click here to read the full article.
EDITOR: We highly recommend reading the entire article which discusses both the biology and the history of misconception stemming from Medieval times. Perhaps it is a good thing that this subject is now open to discussion so that honorable misunderstandings can be corrected.
The headline “Rape trauma as barrier to pregnancy has no scientific basis”, by Reuters News Service is correct but misleading when compared to the context of the politicians speech. Reuters has a duty to print the entire paragraph of the speech, not just a few words from a single sentence.
According to the article, “Among women in their prime reproductive years, 12 to 45, 5 percent of rapes resulted in pregnancy, mostly among adolescents. One-third “did not discover they were pregnant until they had already entered the second trimester,” the researchers found, concluding that “rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency.”
The researchers also committed a faux pas by using the word “significant”. Minus a well known correlation between the word “significant” and the 5% measurement, it should be up to the reader to determine if 5% is significant or not.