More than 64,000 women and girls became pregnant because of rape in states that implemented abortion bans after Roe v. Wade was overruled, according to a new research estimate published online Wednesday.
The research letter, published by JAMA Internal Medicine and headed up by the medical director at Planned Parenthood of Montana, estimated that nearly 520,000 rapes were associated with 64,565 pregnancies across 14 states, most of which had no exceptions that allowed for terminations of pregnancies that occurred as a result of rape.
Texas topped the list, with 45% of the rape-related pregnancies occurring within the state, researchers estimated. Ninety-one percent of the estimated rape-related pregnancies took place in states without exceptions for rape, according to the researchers.
“Few (if any)” of the women and girls who became pregnant because of rape “obtained in-state abortions legally, suggesting that rape exceptions fail to provide reasonable access to abortion for survivors,” the research letter said.
Abortion rape exceptions can be rendered “virtually meaningless” because of rape reporting requirements, said Dr. David Himmelstein, who co-authored the research and teaches at the School of Urban Public Health at Hunter College.
“I think, frankly, those are window dressing exceptions,” Himmelstein said. “They’re not actually exceptions … (that are) effective in making abortion available in cases of rape.”
The researchers used data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI to create their estimates.
The numbers were “really shockingly high,” said one of the authors of the research, Dr. Kari White, an executive and scientific director at the pro-abortion-rights group Resound Research for Reproductive Health.
“Unfortunately, I think that just really reflects how common rape is in the United States,” she said in an interview.
Sexual violence affects millions of people every…
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