In a bid to show that Dutch (rightwing) politicians can be just as thick as their American counterparts, the leader of the SGP (the explicitly rightwing Christian party) argued that rape won’t make you pregnant:
‘Women seldom get pregnant as a result of rape and that is a fact,’ orthodox Christian party SGP leader Kees van der Staaij told a tv programme on Tuesday.
He was reacting to a question about the furore in the US around similar remarks made by Republican congressman Todd Akin.
Van der Staaij said rape is dreadful and recognises the huge consequences for the victims, but his party remains against abortion. ‘We are, under all circumstances, for the unborn life,’ he told the RTL programme.
The SGP has long been ignored and tolerated by Dutch politics as a whole, a principled party that stood for a largely neglected part of the Dutch population, the socalled bible belt. Their views may be old fashioned, even reactionary, but who cares, they’ll never get into government anyway. Which meant that for decades they’ve been able to e.g. get away with not giving women voting rights within the party, while recently, due to the minority rightwing government, it has had an undue influence on government policy in return for its support. So far this has luckily been minimal, but the mere fact that van der Staaij felt comfortable to utter these statements on public television shows the growing confidence of the party.
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