Nearly 65,000 rape-related pregnancies are estimated to have occurred in the 14 US states with near-total abortion bans following the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
This frightening information comes from a new peer-reviewed study published on Wednesday in the medical journal JAMA.
The study estimates that the rapes resulting in the staggering number of pregnancies occurred between July 1, 2022 and January 2024, in states where abortion has been almost completely banned.
Out of the nearly 65,000 pregnancies, its estimated more than 5,500 occurred in states with rape exceptions and nearly 59,000 are estimated for states without exceptions.
Researchers found that more than 26,000 rape-caused pregnancies likely took place in Texas alone.
In the states with rape exceptions for abortions – Idaho, Indiana, Mississippi, West Virginia and North Dakota – survivors are required to report crimes to police in order to access abortion services. Research from 2022 has shown only 21 per cent of victim-survivors do so.
“Thousands of girls and women in states that banned abortion experienced rape-related pregnancy, but few (if any) obtained in-state abortions legally, suggesting that rape exceptions fail to provide reasonable access to abortion for survivors,” researchers concluded.
“Survivors of rape who become pregnant in states with abortion bans may seek a self-managed abortion or try to travel (often hundreds of miles) to a state where abortion is legal, leaving many without a practical alternative to carrying the pregnancy to term.”
The Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling ended the constitutional right to abortion across America that the landmark Roe v. Wade 1973 ruling guaranteed.
“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,” said Samuel Dickman, chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood of Montana, who led the latest study.
“We will never know the true number of survivors of rape and sexual assault in the U.S.”
Data collection
Researchers calculated the findings by combining data from multiple sources, including national data from a U.S Ceners 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 to help determine the number of completed vaginal rapes among girls and women of reproductive age (defined as 15 to 45 years old). State-level rape estimates came from FBI crime reports as state-level data wasn’t available.
Considering that stigma and fear prevents many people from reporting rapes and sexual assaults, the authors noted that the numbers could be lower than reality.