Pro-abortion supporters have long used the argument that abortion should be legal because women who are raped should not be forced to give birth. In a poll published in November, nearly nine in 10 respondents said they’d support abortion access in the event of rape or incest.
Now, a research letter led by a Planned Parenthood-affiliated abortion doctor claims that more than 60,000 pregnancies occurred in pro-life states in the aftermath of the landmark Dobbs decision. The study used numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Bureau of Justice Statistics to come to this conclusion.
The doctor, Dr. Samuel Dickman, in Montana, who authored the research letter, told NPR that he “routinely” sees patients who tell him they became pregnant due to rape. He added that he believes this is “only a fraction of the true number.”
"There are certainly far more survivors of rape who become pregnant as a result, who — for totally understandable reasons — don't want to disclose that fact to a medical provider that they just met,” he told the outlet.
Dickman is the medical director of Planned Parenthood Montana and is a plaintiff in many lawsuits challenging the state’s abortion bans, NPR noted.
In Dickman’s research letter, him and his colleagues estimate that 64,565 pregnancies were caused by rape where abortion is banned (via NPR):
To arrive at the figure of nearly 65,000 rape-caused pregnancies, researchers first estimated the number of rapes that occurred in the states with abortion bans, while those bans were in effect — time periods that vary state-to-state.
"We used the best available research and data that we're aware of to come up with the fraction of women of reproductive age who are survivors of — and the terminology here is horrible — completed vaginal rape," Dickman explains. "The foundation was a survey that the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] conducted that we think is probably the most accurate estimate of not just the sexual assaults that were reported to law enforcement, but also those that weren't reported to law enforcement."
They then used Bureau of Justice Statistics data on criminal victimization and FBI Uniform Crime Reports to assess the number of vaginal rapes of women, ages 15-45, that happened in those 14 states while abortion bans were in effect. The number they arrived at is approximately 520,000 rapes.
Finally, they calculated that 12.5% of those assaults would result in a pregnancy, based on CDC data. "These are hard numbers to come up with — there's no kind of systematic collection at the level of health care providers to be able to answer this question of what's the pregnancy rate among people who have been victims of a completed vaginal rape," Dickman acknowledges. "This is kind of the best we could do."
On the Jama Network website, Dickman and the other authors of the study acknowledged that there is “no recent reliable state-level data on completed vaginal rapes."
Despite this, Dickman told NPR that he was “horrified” by the findings and that these women need “meaningful abortion access.”
The issue of abortion in cases of rape was amplified in 2022 when news broke that a 10-year-old girl in Ohio crossed state lines to Indiana to obtain an abortion. Townhall covered how the man who impregnated the child was an illegal immigrant and the mother’s boyfriend.
In the wake of this new "research," predictably, pro-abortion lawmakers and left-wing news outlets disseminated the study in support of their radical pro-abortion agenda.
“This is heartbreaking. Women across the country are being forced to give birth to their rapist's baby,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) wrote on X. “This cruelty is a direct result of Republicans' extreme abortion bans. We must keep fighting to restore Roe everywhere.”
This is heartbreaking. Women across the country are being forced to give birth to their rapist's baby.
— Tim Kaine (@timkaine) January 25, 2024
This cruelty is a direct result of Republicans' extreme abortion bans. We must keep fighting to restore Roe everywhere. https://t.co/3ErcxqWvLv
Tennessee state Rep. Gloria Johnson, a Democrat who is running for the U.S. Senate against Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, called the results "barbaric" and said that GOP-led pro-life laws allow a rapist to choose the mother of his baby.
The number of women being revictimized by GOP lawmakers is staggering. Allowing a violent rapist to choose the mother of his child, yet preventing the victim of a violent rape from choosing not to carry her rapist’s baby is barbaric. https://t.co/aceBPkWAT5
— Rep. Gloria Johnson (@VoteGloriaJ) January 24, 2024
