Todd Aiken's Arrest Record:
As Missouri Senate Race Tightens, New Details Emerge on Todd Akin's Anti-Abortion Past
http://truth-out.org/news/item/12496-as-missouri-senate-race-tightens-new-details-emerge-on-todd-akins-anti-abortion-past
"............AMY GOODMAN: Once again, tell us the context of the remark. You know, he was interviewed by a local reporter.
KEVIN McDERMOTT: He was interviewed by a local reporter. It was a local television station. He was asked about the—his stance that they’re should not be a rape exception to anti-abortion laws. He’s very anti-abortion. And when the interviewer pressed him, he essentially said, "Well, my understanding from doctors is that rape victims rarely become pregnant; the female body has ways of shutting that whole thing down." This has no basis in medical fact whatsoever, but it’s long been a claim by the far-right anti-abortion movement because it solves a problem that they have, the issue of what to do about rape victims. I’m not saying that Todd Akin doesn’t believe it; I think it’s probably likely that he did. He came out afterward, obviously, and apologized for the comment and retracted it, but by that point the whole world was talking about it.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about what you have just revealed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about his arrest record.
KEVIN McDERMOTT: Yeah, this is a—this is a strange story, because if you talk to Akin’s supporters, not only don’t they think it’s a problem, I think they’re actually proud of him. This is the kind of arrest that folks in his corner view the way that others might view a civil rights arrest. Todd Akin, sometime back this year, let slip during a speech that he had been arrested once—he didn’t mention multiple times; he mentioned once—during an anti-abortion rally. We got curious about that, looked into it and discovered, actually in our own archives, that he had been arrested at least three times in the 1980s. He was going under a—he was using a different name; he was using his first name rather than his middle name. His actual name is William Todd Akin. And that’s why it slipped through the filter the first time.
AMY GOODMAN: You mean the first few times it said "William Akin," not "Todd Akin."
KEVIN McDERMOTT: Correct, correct, right. And this is why it wasn’t something that came to our attention. This was before he was known publicly. This was before he was in office. And again, this wasn’t the kind of arrest that necessarily was a big deal, but—
AMY GOODMAN: But he didn’t talk about it.
KEVIN McDERMOTT: He didn’t talk about that.
AMY GOODMAN: He’s always copped to one.
KEVIN McDERMOTT: He copped to one, and then he wouldn’t discuss details of the one. So, he’s—and this sort of gets in a bigger issue. He’s always been walking this line between trying to appeal to his supporters, who are very conservative, and at the same time trying to at least not be completely rejected by the middle out there, who maybe wouldn’t view that kind of arrest as favorably as some of his conservative supporters do.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, describe the circumstances of these arrests, what he was doing in the ’80s.
KEVIN McDERMOTT: Yeah, these stories—and this was a big thing in St. Louis in the ’80s. There was a—it was happening all over the country. People were getting arrested at these mass protests. And they really did view it as sort of a civil rights issue. You were getting—and in all these cases, I should point out that Todd Akin was arrested with multiple others. But there were some details. In one of the stories, he literally had to be carried by police out of the—out of a hallway where he was protesting, because he just refused to move. It was almost a Martin Luther King, you know, passive resistance kind of thing. These were attempts to shut down business at abortion clinics in the city.
AMY GOODMAN: And he was taken out—what—in one, you describe police carried Akin into an elevator.
KEVIN McDERMOTT: Correct.
AMY GOODMAN: Has he responded to all of this?
KEVIN McDERMOTT: He has—they have not. We’ve asked them multiple times to elaborate on some of this, and they’re just not talking about it.
AMY GOODMAN: The difference between civil disobedience protests, peaceful protests, and these, what was happening at these women’s health clinics at the time? We’re talking about the blockading of clinics.
KEVIN McDERMOTT: You know, I’m going to be careful here, because I wasn’t there, and we don’t have film that we’re looking at. If you talk to Akin and his supporters, they will tell you that this was civil disobedience, that these were peaceful. And, in fact, none of these things resulted, ultimately, in any kind of injury or violence that we know of. So these—you know, it’s kind of in the eye of the beholder as to whether these were something to be proud of or not....."
