How looney can he be if there are scientists studying exactly that premise, that stress-induced hormonal changes (cortisol in particular) may indeed induce miscarriage (aka spontaneous abortion):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18616898
One of the above scientists has also performed research with mice that tends to corroborate the premise that miscarriage can be triggered by the chemistry of stress:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-325674/Stress-really-cause-miscarriages.html
Just sayin ...
“may indeed induce miscarriage...”
But not as a matter of the will, and it still doesn’t answer the question of whether a woman should be allowed to have an abortion in cases of rape or incest.
It is true to some extent that women under prolonged periods of extreme physical and or emotional stress have a higher rate of miscarriage and that some women under prolonged periods of extreme physical and or emotional stress may stop ovulating (you can see this in some women in highly competitive athletics who train hard for many hours a day – gymnasts, marathoners, etc.) But for a woman to be under such stress as to change her hormonal chemistry, that requires a very high level of stress over a prolonged period, not an instance of stress over a short period of time. If what you are claiming to be true, then any pregnant woman who had a bad or stressful day during her pregnancy would miscarry. Any woman in a bad marriage, in a bad economic situation, a stressful job or any number of sorts of life’s daily stresses, would never be able to conceive or carry a pregnancy to term.
A woman who happens to be ovulating when she is raped, assuming she is raped vaginally and that the rapist “completes” the act and is not himself infertile, simply has no mental or physical ability to prevent impregnation nor does the emotional stress of being raped guarantee that she will miscarry.
What on God’s Green Earth does that have to do with anything? Why do you think the relative likelihood of a rape victim conceiving is important to know in the discussion about an abortion exception for rape?
A higher miscarriage rate is something else entirely from “In most cases of legitimate rape, the body’s defenses prevent pregnancy”
The majority of those mice did not miscarry IIRC. Roughly 30000 pregnancies from rape happen every year. Around 11% miscarry and 50% are aborted. The pro life position needs to be that this is 15000 innocent victims. Not that their mothers were not the victims of “legitimate” rape.