Trump Proclaims ‘I Killed Roe v. Wade’ as 134 Rape-Induced Pregnancies Occur Daily in Abortion Ban States

The United States has now witnessed more than two years of Americans suffering from the fallout of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, demolishing 50 years of precedent and the federal right to access abortion. Daily headlines tell the stories of minors forced to give birth, pregnant cancer patients denied necessary treatment, expecting mothers forced to wait in parking lots for urgent care until their condition is deemed life threatening, prosecutions for miscarriages, medevac flights across state lines for those in need of abortion care, and women turned into “walking coffins.”

All women deserve the basic human right to access abortion care. For sexual assault survivors, especially those living in states with total abortion bans, this post-Roe world forces additional trauma on many, stripping them again of bodily autonomy by compelling them to carry forced pregnancies. This is not theoretical: The Center for American Progress Action Fund estimates that every day, 134 women become pregnant as a result of sexual assault in states with total abortion bans.

In January 2024, several doctors published a paper in the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine estimating the number of rape-induced pregnancies in the 14 states with full abortion bans that were implemented after the reversal of Roe. Their findings “estimated that 519,981 survivors of completed rape experienced 64,565 rape-related pregnancies during the 4 to 18 months that bans were in effect.”

Using the data from this study, the CAP Action analysis below inferred the rate of rape-induced pregnancies per day and found that an estimated 134 rape-induced pregnancies occur daily in these same 14 states. This figure underscores the devastating impact abortion bans are having on survivors of sexual violence and is a direct result of former President Trump’s successful effort to “kill Roe v. Wade.”

While five of the 14 states with total abortion bans have rape exceptions in place, the underlying study cited a separate paper that showed less than 10 legal abortions have been performed monthly across all of the total abortion ban states, indicating that the vast majority of rape survivors in those places are unable to access abortion services within their home state. It also noted that “stringent gestational duration limits apply, and survivors must report the rape to law enforcement, a requirement likely to disqualify most survivors of rape, of whom only 21 percent report their rape to police.” Abortion bans are unacceptable, and so-called “rape exceptions” are inaccessible to most survivors. They merely serve to gloss over the impacts of these punitive restrictions. Given that, the estimates presented in this analysis likely understate the scope of the problem.

These numbers are more than just statistics; they represent real individuals who are enduring unnecessary additional trauma, face severely limited options, and are being forced to carry pregnancies. They are part of a large and growing group of people who are being denied the essential care they deserve. This is the reality that former President Trump directly created and boasts of frequently.

But today’s reality is not something the American public supports. Six states have put the question of abortion access to voters via ballot measures since Roe’s reversal, with abortion rights advocates winning in all six, including three—Ohio, Kansas, and Kentucky—that President Trump won in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. More recently, a July survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that “around 6 in 10 Americans think their state should generally allow a person to obtain a legal abortion if they don’t want to be pregnant for any reason.” There are 10 more states with abortion access measures on the ballot in November 2024.

Conclusion

Forced pregnancy for any reason is as unpopular as it is unconscionable. The sizable majorities that support access to abortion nationwide reflect a fundamental belief in compassionate health care for everyone, including some of the most vulnerable such as survivors of sexual violence. It is also a reflection of the widely held belief that women know their circumstances best and are the only ones who should be making their medical decisions.

Methodology

The author divided the estimated rape-induced pregnancies in each of the 14 total abortion ban states in the study entitled “Rape-Related Pregnancies in the 14 US States with Total Abortion Bans,” published in medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine, by the number of months each state’s respective bans had been in place at the conclusion of the study’s examined time period as noted in the same study. The study measured the time between each state’s implementation of its ban and January 2024. The author then converted the rape-induced pregnancies per month figures for each state into daily figures by dividing the monthly figures by 30.5—the average number of days per month in 2024, which is a leap year—and summed those daily figures to get the total number of rape-induced pregnancies in these 14 states. These numbers are based on estimates in the study, which used a combination of primarily federal data to determine the number of vaginally completed rapes and rape-induced pregnancies, since there is no recent reliable data that measures these incidents at the state level and therefore should not be considered as precise counts.

All the caveats and limitations mentioned in the referenced study should apply to this analysis as well. The author would also note a comment from the lead author, Dr. Samuel Dickman, made after the study was published: “According to the CDC data we used, the estimated lifetime risk of pregnancy among survivors of rape is 14.9%. Our analysis conservatively adjusted the figure for survivors of rape downward to account for the difference between annual and lifetime rape-related pregnancy rates.” He goes on later in the note: “The CDC data on rape incidence, on which we based our estimates, quantified the number of persons who reported rape over a 12-month period, which may involve multiple incidents during that time, e.g., in cases of rape by an intimate partner or family member, which represent the majority of rape incidents.” Accounting for this, the study uses “an annual risk of rape-related pregnancy of 12.4% among rape survivors.”