Saturday, March 9, 2024

Rape and 64,000 forced births in two years in states with abortion bans

A research paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, Rape-Related Pregnancies in the 14 US States With Total Abortion Bans, asserts some truly shocking data. That paper is behind a paywall, but Scientific American published an article about it. SciAm writes:
After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, total abortion bans went into effect in 14 states. Nine of these have no exceptions for rape. Now researchers have attempted to quantify the number of pregnancies that have resulted from rapes in states with a total ban—and the numbers they came up with are staggering.

A new study estimates that more than 64,000 pregnancies resulted from rape between July 1, 2022, and January 1, 2024, in states where abortion has been banned throughout pregnancy in all or most cases. Of these, just more than 5,500 are estimated to have occurred in states with rape exceptions—and nearly 59,000 are estimated for states without exceptions. The authors calculate that more than 26,000 rape-caused pregnancies may have taken place in Texas alone.


“Highly stigmatized life events are hard to measure. And many survivors of sexual violence do not want to disclose that they went through this incredibly stigmatizing traumatic life event,” says Samuel Dickman, chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood of Montana, who led the study. “We will never know the true number of survivors of rape and sexual assault in the U.S.”

The researchers obtained their findings by combining data from multiple sources. Because state-level data weren’t available, the team analyzed national data from a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey on intimate partner sexual violence from 2016 to 2017. The researchers also used a Bureau of Justice Statistics survey on criminal victimization. Putting these together, they determined the number of completed vaginal rapes among girls and women of reproductive age—defined as between the ages of 15 and 45 (although some even younger girls and older women are also capable of pregnancy). 

The findings suggest that thousands of people who were raped became pregnant in states where abortion was banned. Even in states with exceptions for rape, very few people got an abortion—likely because of fear and intimidation, Dickman speculates. Some pregnant people in states with bans may have traveled out of state to obtain an abortion legally, but some would have needed to travel hundreds of miles—a journey that is impractical or impossible for many people.

A PBS interview with one of the authors, Dr. Sam Dickman includes these comments:
Interviewer: And you say in your report — or at least I take it you're saying that this could actually be an undercount.

Dickman: Some people will never report that they were sexually assaulted even on an anonymous survey. So that would cause our estimates to be too low. On the other hand, there are other assumptions that we have to make in a modeling study that might bias the estimates to be too high. So we think we use the best available data using published peer-reviewed research. But, of course, these are just estimates.

Interviewer: As we mentioned, there are five states that do have exceptions for rape, but under very tight restrictions. Given those restrictions, how meaningful are those exceptions?

Dickman: Those exceptions provide no meaningful abortion care for survivors of rape and sexual assault, full stop. There are no abortions happening for survivors of rape in states like Idaho that supposedly have exceptions for rape. But we know that, because of the extremely burdensome criteria for obtaining an abortion, not just on the survivor, but on the medical provider, that providers are essentially telling those survivors of rape that they need to travel out of state or find somewhere else to go or continue a pregnancy that was a result of sexual violence.
This is the face of authoritarian Christian nationalist, Christian Sharia law. It is brutal. It is an example of brute force theocratic dictatorship in action. We can expect this to get a heck of a lot worse if DJT gets re-elected.

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