In States Where Republicans Banned Abortion With No Exception for Rape, Rape Led to 58,979 Pregnancies Post-Roe

In September 2021, Texas governor Greg Abbott boldly claimed that his state’s barbaric abortion law, which banned the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy with no exceptions for incest or rape, was not actually as bad as it sounded because he was going to “eliminate” rape. “Rape is a crime and Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them and getting them off the streets,” Abbott said, in all seriousness.

Not surprisingly, Abbott did not eliminate rape. But nine months after his absurd attempt to explain why it was perfectly reasonable to force sexual assault victims in his state to carry their pregnancies to term, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and a whole bunch other states also banned abortion without exceptions. And guess what? Rape—and rape that resulted in pregnancy—kept happening in those places too.

Just how many people have been raped and impregnated in states where, thanks to politicians like Abbott, the law prohibits them from terminating the pregnancy? According to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, an absolutely staggering number:

In the 14 states that implemented total abortion bans following the Dobbs decision, we estimated that 519,981 completed rapes were associated with 64,565 pregnancies during the four to 18 months that bans were in effect. Of these, an estimated 5,586 rape-related pregnancies (9%) occurred in states with rape exceptions, and 58,979 (91%) in states with no exception, with 26,313 (45%) in Texas.

The study, which was led by the medical director at Planned Parenthood of Montana, also revealed that “10 or fewer legal abortions occurred monthly in each of the total abortion ban states,” which “indicates that persons who have been raped and become pregnant cannot access legal abortions in their home state, even in states with rape exceptions.” Which, of course, is exactly what the politicians who championed, voted for, and signed these abortion bans wanted. As JAMA’s editors write in a note about the study, “Whether these survivors of rape had illegal abortions, received medication abortion through the mail, traveled to other states, or carried the child to birth is unknown.”

In which a male Republican claims to be an expert on women’s health care because he was a vet

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