Pregnancies after rape may top 60K in sites with no abortion
14 states have passed near-total ban since ’22
Researchers estimated there may have been more than 64,500 pregnancies resulting from rape in the 14 states that have enacted near-total abortion bans since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, according to a research letter published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
Other research has found the number of abortions fell to nearly zero in states with the strictest bans, which indicates people who were raped and became pregnant couldn’t access abortions in their home state, even when there is an exception for rape, according to the study by researchers from Planned Parenthood of Montana, Hunter College in New York, Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts and the University of California, San Francisco.
“These are people who have really experienced a very traumatic event,” said study co-author Kari White, executive and scientific director for Renowned Research for Reproductive Health in Texas. “Not only have they lost their own reproductive autonomy as a result, but that’s now being further undermined by the policies in place in their state that are really now making it difficult for them to make their own personal decisions about and determine the trajectory of their lives following this event.”
To generate this estimate, researchers combined several surveys and reports, White said, including estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the frequency of rapes nationwide, the fraction of rape survivors of child-bearing age from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and state-level data on the number of rapes from the FBI’s most recent uniform crime report.
Using other peer-reviewed studies to determine how often rape results in pregnancy, White said the group found 64,565 rape-related pregnancies occurred in the four to 18 months bans were in effect in the 14 states with strict abortion bans.
Lack of data made study difficult, researcher says
White said getting accurate and reliable data on rape and pregnancies that result from rape is difficult in part because it is such a sensitive topic. A 2018 study by CDC researchers estimated about 2.9 million women in the U.S. experienced a rape-related pregnancy during their lifetime.
White acknowledged the estimate reached in the study is not definitive.
“Even some of those estimates provided by the CDC report are considered to be underestimates, so the incidence of rape may be more common than what we estimated in our study,” White said.
Still, she added, “anybody who experiences this is one person too many.”
Alison Norris, a professor at The Ohio State University who studies sexual and reproductive health and was not involved in the study, said that despite the limitations of the data, the research is “extremely, thoughtfully executed.”
Even with exceptions, barriers to abortion for rape survivors exist
The study does not estimate how many rape survivors are likely to seek an abortion, and White said there is not good data on how often this happens. An analysis of survey data from 2004 and 1987 by the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization that supports abortion rights, found 1% of women reported that being raped contributed to their decision to get an abortion.
But more than 90% of the thousands of estimated rape-related pregnancies occurred in states that don’t include an exception for rape in their abortion bans, including 26,313 in Texas, which White said can force people who do want an abortion to travel out of state. The proportion of patients traveling out of state to get an abortion has risen from 1 in 10 in 2020 to nearly 1 in 5 in the first half of 2023, according to a study in December from the Guttmacher Institute.