Josh Barro, Columnist

Todd Akin and the Right's False Fact Machine

August 21, 2012 at 9:35 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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Todd Akin is in trouble for making a claim that is both false and offensive: that a biological mechanism causes it to be extremely unlikely for a woman to get pregnant if she is raped. The implication is that a pregnant woman seeking an abortion on the grounds that she was raped is likely lying.

If Akin knew he was wrong on the biology, he probably could have predicted that his remarks would cause a firestorm. The reason Akin walked into this mess is that he lives inside a right-wing bubble, where people believe in false but politically convenient "facts" about science and history.