A report claims that more than 500,000 rapes have led to nearly 65,000 pregnancies across 14 U.S. states that have banned abortions since the Dobbs Decision.
The report, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, is entirely based on estimations.
“We estimated rape-related pregnancies by state to assess how abortion bans affected survivors of rape,” it says.
The authors admit that because “no recent reliable state-level data on completed vaginal rapes are available,” they “analyzed multiple data sources to estimate reported and unreported rapes in states with total abortion bans.” They also note that they estimated a “number of resulting pregnancies based on findings from prior research on rape-related pregnancy rate.”
The numbers presented in the report are therefore estimations rather than hard data.
“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 4 to 18 months that bans were in effect,” the report adds. “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.”
Official data not mentioned in the report, however, suggests that Texas has had 16.5K rapes in 2023. The data does not indicate how many of these rapes resulted in pregnancies.
The report concluded that “highly stigmatized experiences are difficult to measure accurately in surveys.”
One of the report’s authors, Samuel Dickman, is affiliated with Planned Parenthood.
American Faith reported in July that the “Texas Heartbeat Act,” enacted on September 1, 2021, is estimated to have resulted in approximately 10,000 fewer abortions from April to December 2022.
According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2022, an examination of 80,107 abortions between September 2020 and February 2022 showed “a decrease in total in-state and out-of-state abortions in September 2021 compared with August 2021.”
A team from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health used a sophisticated statistical model to scrutinize live birth data from all U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
Their findings indicate that without the enactment of SB 8, Texas would have seen 287,289 live births from April to December 2022.
Contrastingly, with the ban in place, Texas recorded 297,088 births during the same period.
This suggests a likely reduction of 9,799 abortions, averaging over 1,000 a month.
