Following the Supreme Court decision to strike down the federal right to an abortion, tens of thousands of pregnancies from rapes are estimated to have occurred in states that subsequently introduced abortion bans, according to a study.
Research from published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Wednesday used national data on sexual violence to calculate that about 520,000 rapes led to 64,565 pregnancies between July 2022 and Jan. 1, 2024, in the 14 states that introduced near-total abortion bans after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
Of those rape-related pregnancies, over 90 percent were estimated to have occurred in states without rape exceptions. The study, led by the medical director of Planned Parenthood of Montana, also cited separate research that found that 10 or fewer legal abortions have taken place per month in states with the strictest bans, suggesting that rape survivors are unable to seek safe abortions in the states where they live and are instead either forced to travel long distances for abortion access or to carry their pregnancies to term.
“Restricting abortion access to survivors of rape can have particularly devastating consequences,” the academic journal’s editor’s wrote in a note about the new 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.”
