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Since the Supreme Court’s decision was overturned, 14 states have banned abortion at any gestational age. Roe vs. Wade Since these anti-abortion laws went into effect, an estimated 64,565 people have become pregnant as a result of rape in these states. However, all of her states recorded rape, although five of her 14 states have exceptions for rape. Fewer than 10 legal abortions per month Since the respective prohibitions were enacted.
Survey results released this week JAMA Internal Medicine Ph.D.provides a critical analysis of the impact of such a ban on reproductive health care. Although the study did not assess how many of the estimated 64,565 pregnancies ended in live birth, tens of thousands of pregnant rape victims, including children, underwent illegal procedures, self-managed abortions, or burdensome abortions. It is clear that he was forced to travel to such states. There, instead of bringing rape-related pregnancies to term, abortion is legal and cost-prohibitive for many.
It also became clear that legal exceptions to rape do not work. States with these exceptions impose strict pregnancy deadlines and require victims to report rape to law enforcement, which is likely to result in disqualification for most. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that: Only 21 percent of victims report rape to policefor a myriad of reasons.
in Editor’s note accompanying the studyJAMA Internal Medicine editors, who are also medical researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, Harvard University, and New York City Health and Hospitals, said the findings show that the number of rape-related cases “demonstrates the scope of the problem.” ing. In these states, the number of pregnancies is “exponentially higher” than the number of legal abortions.
“As physicians, we do not view abortion as a political, religious, or legal issue; rather, access to safe abortion is a reproductive and “We believe that this is a necessary part of the health service and that national law protects everyone’s right to choose abortion,” they wrote.
research design
The study, led by researchers at Planned Parenthood of Montana, is only an estimate because hard state-level numbers are not available. The researchers looked at rape data from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, the FBI, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (a survey specifically designed to identify reported and unreported rapes). was extracted.
The researchers used national data from a variety of sources to estimate the proportion of rape victims who were women between the ages of 15 and 45, and also adjusted for the number of vaginal rapes. To estimate state-level rape, they prorated the number of rapes by state based on the FBI’s 2022 crime data, which includes rape. We then multiplied each state’s number of rapes by the percentage of rapes that were likely to result in pregnancy. And finally, we adjusted for the months from July 1, 2022 to January 1, 2024, when abortion bans were in effect in each of the 14 states. Of the 14 states, the number of months the ban was in effect ranged from four to 18 months.
The researchers estimated that a total of 519,981 vaginal rapes were completed in the 14 abortion-ban states, resulting in a total of 64,565 pregnancies between 4 and 18 months during the ban. An estimated 5,586 (9 percent) of rape-related pregnancies were in states with rape exceptions and 58,979 (91 percent) were in states without exceptions.
Texas, the most populous state, is an anti-abortion state and accounted for an estimated 26,313 (41%) of all rape-related pregnancies covered by abortion bans that were in place for 16 months during the study period. Many in the state are calling on Gov. Greg Abbott to “eradicate rape” in Texas, especially after a six-week abortion ban went into effect in 2021 (the state enacted a total ban in August 2022). Given the pledge, it drew the ire of Democratic state legislators.
In a news release Thursday, 13 Democratic state senators said, “Women and girls across the state endure unintended pregnancies, suffer life-threatening complications in wanted pregnancies, and seek medical care from the state. We are evacuating outside.” As reported by the Houston Chronicle. “We cannot allow this to become the new normal.”