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After 'embarrassing' rape comments, California Republican Assembly ousts president

California Republican Celeste Greig has been ousted from her post as president of the state's Republican Assembly in the aftermath of a comment she made about rape, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

Greig was voted out at a CRA convention, after a statement she made in March:

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“Granted, the percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it’s an act of violence, because the body is traumatized. I don’t know what percentage of pregnancies are due to the violence of rape. Because of the trauma the body goes through, I don’t know what percentage of pregnancy results from the act.”

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The CRA, which Ronald Reagan once called the "conscience of the Republican Party," ousted Greig as president last weekend, replacing her with John Briscoe, a 63-year-old accountant from Fountain Valley.

Briscoe's campaign manager, Aaron Park, a conservative blogger from the Sacramento area, said Greig's comment that pregnancy by rape is rare "because the body is traumatized" was "embarrassing" and led to a collapse of her support among CRA members. He added that her failure to address the blowback compounded the problem.

Leading up to the election, Park wrote in his blog, RightOnDaily.com: "If for some strange reason Celeste Greig gets re-elected, the future of the CRA is in extreme peril because no one running for office will want a CRA endorsement."

Greig was unavailable for comment.

Statewide, GOP registration has fallen from about 36 percent in 1996 to 29 percent this past fall. Among the anti-abortion activists in the GOP base, many oppose abortion even if the pregnancy resulted from rape on grounds that the unborn child shouldn't pay with its life for the father's crime. But polls suggest most voters believe the woman still should make that choice. That's made it tough for Republican politicians.

Though CRA members are strongly anti-abortion, Park said, "you cannot put faith in someone who's talking about the virtue of saving babies but looks like they don't care about women who are sexually assaulted." http://www.mercurynews.com/­internal-affairs­/ci_23176609/&#
173;internal-affairs­-after-embarras­sing-rape-comme­nts-california-­republican]

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"If a woman is near-ovulating or ovulating, and sperm comes in direct contact, she gets pregnant -- it doesn't matter what the nature of the act was," said Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley. "It's just outrageous, beyond absurd. It's insulting. It's the same line of thinking of 'If we just dress differently, or behave differently, we won't be raped.' They're basically saying 'while we're being raped, if we hate it enough we won't get pregnant.'"

Most research on rape and pregnancy has shown roughly the same rates of pregnancy as pregnancies resulting from consensual sex. But one 2003 study from St. Lawrence University showed the rate at which women get pregnant after rape to be more than double that of a single act of consensual sex.

With consensual sex, the authors theorized, women have the option of declining sex or using contraception when there is a high likelihood of getting pregnant because of their ovulation cycle.

The per-incident rape-pregnancy rate was 6.42 percent, according to the report, which was published in the journal Human Nature. Of women having consensual sex, the per-incident pregnancy rate was 3.1 percent. (From http://www.mercurynews.com/california-budget/ci_22701070/california-go
p-leader-steps-into-rape-pregnancy-controversy)

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"Greig was unavailable for comment." Too bad she didn't try that earlier...