Have Pro-Life States Had 64,000 Pregnancies Due to Rape?

Michael New, a scholar with the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, says, “To call those figures an exaggeration would be an understatement. The article is frankly one of the worst and most misleading pieces of advocacy research that I have ever encountered in my years as social scientist.”

He has written an article for National Review entitled No, 64,000 Children Have Not Been Conceived in Rape in States with Pro-Life Laws that explains why.

First, the study assumes that 12.5% of rapes result in conception, a percentage that is then applied to the total number of rapes in those states to calculate the number of conceptions.  But that rate, according to New, is way too high.  An earlier study based on an actual survey of rape victims found that the rate is 5%.

Second, there is a very wide disparity in reported rape statistics.  JAMA’s numbers come from a  Centers for Disease Control study that estimated that 1.4 million women were victims of rape in 2016-2017.  But that’s four times as many as the National Crime Victimization Survey carried out by the Department of Justice.  And it’s ten times as many as were actually reported to law enforcement.  And, as we will detail below, the CDC numbers have been criticized for inflating the numbers.

Granted, there are more sexual assaults than are reported to the police, but the JAMA article says nothing about the contested figures.  Rather, it goes with the highest estimates of both the number of assaults and the rate of conception and treats them as facts.

Furthermore, the JAMA numbers are contradicted by the abortion statistics.  New writes,

Finally, if one extrapolates the authors’ calculations to the entire country, there would have been about 178,000 children conceived in rape in 2017. If half of the rape victims decided to obtain abortions, that means that approximately 10 percent of all abortions were performed on rape victims. However, multiple Guttmacher surveys find that only 1 percent of women seeking abortions cite being a rape victim as a reason for obtaining an abortion. This clearly shows how exaggerated these estimates really are.

New also points out the conflicts of interest with the researchers.  The lead author, for example, Samuel Dickman, is the medical director of Planned Parenthood of Montana.  New gives other examples of “thinly-researched articles” published by health-related academic journals propagandizing for abortion.  He concludes, “Overall, academic journals should stick to publishing rigorous peer-reviewed research instead of serving mouthpieces for supporters of legal abortion.”

For a critique of the CDC abortion numbers, see Cathy Young’s article in Time Magazine entitled The CDC’s Rape Numbers Are Misleading.  Among other problems, the study counts sex while intoxicated as sex while “unable to consent.”  It could be, but is not necessarily.  But such “incapacitated rape” accounts for almost two-thirds of the CDC estimates.

Rape is a great evil.  Any number is too much.  Our sex-crazed, sexually permissive, pornified cultural climate is part of the problem.  Sex results in babies, which is why it must be reserved for marriage.  Getting pregnant because of a rape is surely traumatic, though it isn’t the baby’s fault and it’s the perpetrator, not the child, who deserves the death penalty.

So it’s especially contemptible to weaponize the fear of rape and of getting pregnant from rape in an attempt to manipulate women by scaring them into supporting abortion.

And it’s also contemptible to do so with highly questionable research published by medical professionals in collusion with the abortion industry.

Photo by FamilyMan88, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons