Dear Congressman Akin,

I tend to save my open letters for pregnant celebrities who need some encouragement and love and reality TV shows who are making me mad, but you have suddenly become worthy of your own. Why you might ask? Well, I would like to share some thoughts with you regarding your statement about rape. Or rather rape that isn’t “legitimate”, as you chose to put it.

Somewhere, a girl sits alone in a hospital room going through unimaginable pain. Perhaps she went on a date with a guy she had been fantasizing about who turned out to be anything but a fantasy. And now she sits waiting on a cold hospital gurney behind a curtain to be further violated so that she can try and stop this man from ever being another woman’s fantasy date.

I wonder, Mr. Akin, if she feels less pain than the woman attacked in an alley by a stranger. Does she feel any safer because she knew her rapist? Will the doctors and nurses comfort her any less or make her feel that her rape was not legitimate because she is not bleeding from her face or picking stranger’s photos out of a police book?

If you were standing there watching her struggle with her complete loss of innocence, her complete loss of dignity, her complete loss of any control over her own body, would you somehow explain that she can’t categorize her rape as legitimate because maybe her body didn’t naturally “shut that whole thing down”?

Somehow I wonder if you saw up close and personal an actual victim of rape if you might feel differently? If maybe it would stop being contextual for you and perhaps become real?

Or what if you thought for a single moment that your words would keep a young woman in the worst moments of her life from trying to save future victims because somehow she felt less than legitimate in her claims? What would you say then?

See, I don’t know this hypothetical woman personally, but I don’t have to. I see her in the faces of my daughters, and I can’t help but pray that if they ever found themselves in this situation that no one would imply or ever even suggest that their trauma was not legitimate.

Please know, Mr. Akin, for me this letter is not political. It is personal.

Remember that words matter,

Ashley

P.S. Despite the fact that you claim a “doctor” gave you this information, when a sperm meets an egg, it doesn’t matter if it is the result of a blissful marriage union or a brutal rape, pregnancy can happen. In the words of Neil deGrasse Tyson: The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.