The Supreme Court, in June 2022, decided that Americans don’t have the constitutional right to abortion by reversing Roe v. Wade. Less than two years later, states that banned abortion following this ruling now have an alarming number of rape pregnancies.
Based on a new research estimate, at least 64,000 women in 14 states became pregnant for their rapists. JAMA Internal Medicine published the research letter online last Wednesday.
“In this cross-sectional study, thousands of girls and women in states that banned abortion experienced rape-related pregnancy, but few (if any) obtained in-state abortions legally, suggesting that rape exceptions fail to provide reasonable access to abortion for survivors,” the study concluded.
According to the research letter, most of the states have no exception for terminating rape-related pregnancies. It cited Texas as the state with the most pregnancies by rape, having a whooping 45% (26,313) of the recorded cases. This is more than four times the number in Missouri, the second state on the list.
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Vice President Kamala Harris has swiftly reacted to this report. In her words, “Women across our nation should not be subject to extreme and oppressive laws that dictate what they can do with their bodies, including and especially after surviving a violent crime.”
“The women of Texas and women of America deserve the freedom to make these personal decisions without the government telling them what to do. I will continue to fight for the fundamental freedoms of everyone throughout the country,” she added.
Co-author of the study, Dr. David Himmelstein, is a teacher at Hunter College’s School of Urban Public Health. For him, even the abortion rape exceptions are “virtually meaningless.” “I think, frankly, those are window dressing exceptions,” he said. “They’re not actually exceptions … (that are) effective in making abortion available in cases of rape.”
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Meanwhile, Dr. Kari White of Resound Research for Reproductive Health, a pro-abortion-rights group, has expressed concern over the alarming figures. In an interview, she said the “really shockingly high” numbers are proof of how prevalent rape is in the country.
Every year, millions of people living in the USA become victims of sexual violence, says the CDC. While being a rape survivor is a horror all by itself, having no choice concerning a resultant pregnancy worsens the situation.
White expressed this point of view succinctly when she said that the abortion bans are “really interfering with people’s abilities to make decisions about their reproductive health care that are very personal.”
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According to another pro-abortion-rights organization, the Guttmacher Institute, 12 states have stringent, almost complete abortion bans. In states like North Dakota and Wisconsin that didn’t outlaw abortions, some factors have complicated access to the service.
For example, while Wisconsin faces legal uncertainty regarding abortions, the only abortion clinic in North Dakota has moved to Minnesota. Nevertheless, President Joe Biden has never failed to express his favorable disposition to abortion and reproduction rights.
In a recent trip to Virginia, he stated that the rule in Roe v. Wade should be law. The president also mentioned that he’ll promptly sign any bill that guarantees abortion protections if Congress passes it.
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