Rep. Todd Akin let the cat out of the bag on Republican legislators ... But there actually is science on this issue, and—shockingly!—it's not on their side.

But the science? A study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology estimated, from a sample of 4,008 women, that:

The national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year.

Akin certainly has a claim, what with the "eww, lady parts, I don't even want to think about it" vagueness of his claim that women's bodies "shut that whole thing down," ... he has fierce competition from Pennsylvania state Rep. Stephen Freind, who claimed that raped women "secrete a certain secretion which has the tendency to kill sperm," as well as North Carolina state Rep. Henry Aldridge, who said that "The facts show that people who are raped – truly raped – the juices don’t flow." ...

Another study, using a sample of 405 women who reported having been raped once, found a pregnancy rate of 6.4 percent ...

Since this particular set of claims falls into two Republican sweet spots—anti-science and anti-abortion—I wouldn't look for this to be the last time this theory raises its head ...