It’s easy enough to dismiss an unpopular claim, but harder to really question it. Before the 2012 elections, for example, abortion opponents started touting scientific evidence that women rarely got pregnant from rape. There was no shortage of commentary that followed – most of it critical and dismissive. Emily Bazelon went a step further and questioned whether abortion foes were referring to specific studies, and if so, who did these studies and why.
What she found took her down a twisted path through the harrowing world of Nazi science. The latest chapter in her investigations came out last week in a Slate piece headlined, The Nazi Anatomists. Here’s the second graph, about a young medical student named Charlotte Pommer and her boss, anatomist Herman Stieve:
Stieve got his “material,” as he called the bodies he used for research, from nearby Plötzensee Prison, where the courts sent defendants for execution after sentencing them to die. In the years following the war, Stieve would claim that he dissected the corpses of only “dangerous criminals.” But on that day, Pommer saw in his laboratory the bodies of political dissidents. She recognized these people. She knew them.
The piece slowly explains that Stieve was interested in the effects of stress on the female reproductive system and used the bodies of political dissidents to study how awaiting a death sentence affects ovarian function.
Stieve published 230 anatomical papers. With the data he gathered pre-execution, as well as the tissues and organs he harvested and studied, he could chart the effect of an impending execution on ovulation. Stieve found that women living with a looming death sentence ovulated less predictably and sometimes experienced what he called “shock bleedings.” In a book published after the war, Stieve included an illustration of the left ovary of a 22-year-old woman, noting that she “had not menstruated for 157 days due to nervous agitation.”…
He also got details of the women’s medical histories before they died, including information about their menstrual cycles, their reactions to the prison environment, and the impact of receiving a death sentence.
The story links to earlier pieces in Slate and the New York Times Magazine detailing the way abortion foes latched onto this work decades later, using it to back claims that rape wouldn’t lead to pregnancy because the experience was so stressful. In this latest story it’s only covered briefly:
Whether they know it or not, Stieve’s work is the source for their discredited claim. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists warned that saying rape victims rarely get pregnant was “medically inaccurate, offensive, and dangerous.” But the anti-abortion doctor Jack Willke, former head of the National Right to Life Committee, insisted otherwise. "This goes back 30 and 40 years,” he told the Los Angeles Times in the midst of the Akin furor. “When a woman is assaulted and raped, there's a tremendous amount of emotional upset within her body." Willke has written that "one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant” is “physical trauma."
The story unfolds a larger history of Nazi doctors making use of the corpses of political dissidents to study human anatomy and physiology and the ethical questions surrounding continued use of the data they gathered.
The piece also illustrates the meaninglessness of the rhetoric labeling people “pro-science” and “anti-science”. Some of the work of Nazi anatomists turned out to be useful and accurate. But few pro-science types would champion it. Even the most enthusiastic science proponents have to draw the line somewhere.
Leave a Reply