By Susan Heavey
Reuters
Gay people in the United States are just as likely as heterosexuals to experience domestic violence, sexual violence or stalking, and bisexual women are more likely than other women to be abused, federal health experts said on Friday.

Until now, little had been known about how often violence occurred among gays and bisexuals in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said of its findings. The CDC said its report offered the first national data on the issue.

"We know that violence affects everyone, regardless of sexual orientation. This report suggests that lesbians, gay men and bisexuals in this country suffer a heavy toll of sexual violence and stalking committed by an intimate partner," CDC Director Tom Frieden said in a statement.

For example, domestic violence against a woman was reported by nearly 44 percent of lesbians and about 61 percent by bisexuals compared to 35 percent of heterosexuals. Among men, 26 percent of gays and about 37 percent of bisexuals reported partner violence compared to 29 percent of heterosexuals.

"Bisexual woman had significantly higher prevalence of virtually all types of sexual violence," the CDC said in its report.

Additionally, CDC found the majority of women who experienced violence, regardless of their sexual orientation, faced male perpetrators.

It also looked at rape, and among female victims found that 48 percent of bisexual women and 28 percent of straight women experienced their first rape between the ages of 11 and 17 years.

The agency's findings come as Democrats push to renew the Violence Against Women Act, a bipartisan 1994 law that has been reauthorized several times but officially expired in 2011. The law aims to protect domestic violence victims by easing access to legal protection orders and preventing a victim's sexual history from being cited at trial, among other steps.

Democrats, who control the Senate, reintroduced the measure this week in both chambers of Congress. It has bipartisan support in the Senate, but it is unclear how the bill will progress in the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said CDC's finding support the need for his version of the bill's reintroduction, which also includes strong protections for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

"A victim is a victim is a victim, and no victim of these crimes should be denied access to these crucial services," he said in a statement.

CDC's study, which reviewed 2010 data from its National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey of more than 16,000 U.S. adults, is critical for prevention programs and policies in hopes of reducing such incidents, the agency said.

It also called for more research on the issue, and said it would work with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, or LGBT, communities to bring more attention to the problem.

"This information is critical to informing prevention programs and policies aimed at reducing these types of victimization," it said.

When Missouri Republican Senate nominee Todd Akin got himself in hot water by suggesting that “legitimate rape” rarely led to pregnancy, he insisted that doctors backed up his position.

The question is: Which doctors?

Physicians and rape experts say there’s no way the trauma of rape would prevent pregnancy from occurring.

“If a woman’s ovaries have already released an egg, she’s just as likely to get pregnant from a rape as she would be from a voluntary encounter,” Dr. Barbara Levy, vice president for health policy at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told NBC News. “From the biological standpoint, a woman is at risk for pregnancy if she’s at a vulnerable point in her menstrual cycle when the rape occurs.”

On Sunday Rep. Akin, who is in the middle of a hard-fought campaign for a senate seat in Missouri, was defending his stance on abortion rights in instances when a woman is the victim of a rape.

“People always want to make it into one of those things – well, how do you slice this particularly tough ethical question,” Akin said in an interview on KTVI-TV. “First of all, from what I understand from doctors, [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Although Akin later tried to cool things down by apologizing and mentioning his empathy for abused women, he never actually took back his suggestion that women are less likely to become pregnant if the sex was non-consensual.

“In reviewing my off-the-cuff remarks, it’s clear that I misspoke in this interview and it does not reflect the deep empathy I hold for the thousands of women who are raped and abused every year,” he said.

Gail Abarbanel, founder and director of the Rape Treatment Center at the Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center, was appalled by Akin’s remarks.

“I think his statement shows such a profound lack of knowledge about rape, the law, and the biology of women’s bodies,” Abarbanel said. “One of the most devastating consequences of rape is getting pregnant. To make the victim responsible for it is outrageous and offensive.”

Akin’s comments imply that women have some control over whether they get pregnant – and not so subtly suggest that women who conceive after an attack might not have experienced a “legitimate” rape, Abarbanel said.

“It’s another example of the blame-the-victim mentality that is so pervasive in our culture,” she said. “So much of the prevention advice you read in the media is telling women how not to get raped. Rape is only going to be prevented when you stop people from doing it.”

Akin’s not the first politician to claim the rape can prevent pregnancy, according to a report in the Washington Post. The anti-abortion thinking goes back to the 1980s, with politicians from Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Arkansas making the argument that rape disrupts conception, the newspaper reported Monday.  

While some anti-abortion politicians profess knowledge of female reproductive biology, one doctor compared it to medieval thinking.

“My first reaction was OMG,” said Dr. Amy Rosenman, an assistant clinical professor at the UCLA. “It’s unbelievable. Stuff like that is from the dark ages...there is no physiologic method that prevents pregnancy in the case of rape. If there is an egg available and there are sperm available and they meet, then pregnancy occurs. The ovary and the ovum cannot differentiate sperm from friend or foe.”

In fact, each year 32,000 pregnancies result from rape, according to an article published in 1996 in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

“Simply put, Rep. Akin's claim is ridiculous,” said Katherine Hull, a spokesperson for RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. “Supporting victims — and recognizing the impact of the crime on them — is the very least we should expect from our political leaders."

Related:

Akin pledges to stay in race following rape comments