IIn the 14 American states that criminalized abortion after the Supreme Court overturned nationwide abortion laws, an estimated 65,000 women were estimated to have become pregnant after rape as of the beginning of the year. According to a study now published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, Texas accounts for more than 26,000 of the pregnancies following sexual assault. After the abortion law was changed at the end of June 2022, the state fundamentally banned abortions. Texas only allows abortion in cases where the mother's life is at risk.
Abortion is now also punished in South Dakota, Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Alabama. In addition, the states of Idaho, North Dakota, Indiana, West Virginia and Mississippi passed laws banning abortions. After rape, women are allowed to terminate the pregnancy there.
As Samuel Dickman, lead author of the study “Rape-Related Pregnancies in the 14 US States With Total Abortion Bans,” assumes, many women, even in states with exemptions after sexual assault, chose not to have an abortion in their home state for fear of reprisals. “Some of the rape victims try to have abortions themselves. Others travel a few hundred miles to states that allow abortions to have the procedure done there,” the doctor summarized.
More than 520,000 attacks
For the study, Dickman, who works in Montana for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, an abortion provider, evaluated data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Federal Police and the Department of Violence Statistics at the Department of Justice in Washington, among others. As he and his co-authors said, the results of their studies were based on estimates, as some of the surveys, for example, did not separate vaginal rape from other types of sexual assault.
In total, the authors calculated more than 520,000 attacks in the 14 states with abortion bans. About one in eight “completed vaginal rapes” resulted in pregnancy. One of the most well-known cases in recent years is Hadley Duvall from Kentucky, who was pregnant with a child at the age of twelve after being raped by her stepfather.
Last week, the now twenty-one-year-old spoke out in favor of a bill from Democratic Rep. David Yates that would allow abortions for victims of rape and incest in Kentucky. “Women and girls who endured such abuse should not be harmed by the state of Kentucky,” said Duvall, whose pregnancy ended in miscarriage at the time.
The student at Midway Christian University in Woodford County also announced that she would continue to campaign against abortion bans in the months leading up to the presidential election in early November. “There are a lot of people who think they know what a woman who has an abortion looks like,” Duvall told The Washington Post. “There is a Hadley in almost every household. She can be your sister or your niece.”
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