Nearly 65,000 rape-related pregnancies occurred in states with total or near-total abortion bans post-Dobbs v. Jackson, new research finds, while those same states saw only a handful of legal abortions performed on average per month.
According to research published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on Wednesday, there were an estimated 64,565 pregnancies related to rape during the periods when abortion bans were active across the 14 states with total or near total bans between July 2022 and the beginning of this year.
Researchers estimate that 5,586 of these pregnancies occurred in states whose bans technically — though often not in practice — have exceptions for rape, while 58,979 happened in states without exceptions. In Texas alone, where there are no exceptions except for medical emergencies — which, again, are often not granted in practice — there were 26,313 rape-related pregnancies in this period.
Meanwhile, the study found that these same states saw 10 or fewer […]