The barbarity of the American anti-abortion movement
By 
A new study demonstrates the falsity of the common claim of abortion criminalizers that pregnancies resulting from rape are rare:
One of the many lies that anti-abortion activists and legislators tell is that rape-related pregnancies are rare. It’s a claim designed to hide their utter cruelty, and to pivot when asked about abortion ban exceptions.
They’re not going to be able to hide from this number: 65,000. That’s the estimated number of rape-related pregnancies in anti-choice states since they passed abortion bans. 65,000. If you feel ill, you’re not alone.
The research, published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine, looked 14 states where abortion was banned, and used data from the CDC, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and FBI Uniform Crime Reports to come up with their estimate. One of the study’s authors, Dr. Samuel Dickman, a Montana abortion provider and researcher at the City University of New York, told NPR he was “horrified.”
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There’s a reason that conservatives consistently downplay how many women and girls are raped: They know that Americans very much oppose sexual violence victims being forced into childbirth. Anti-abortion lawmakers and activists believe that if they pretend rape-related pregnancy—or rape, in general—is rare, they can hide their extremism.
But the truth is that these people don’t want anyone to be able to have an abortion, ever. Not if they’re a rape victim, not if they’re a child, not if their life is in danger. (Yes, even those who back ‘exceptions’; they know they’re not real.) That’s why Republicans’ only messaging recourse has been saying over and over again that cases like these almost never happen.
Some even claim that women can’t get pregnant from a rape. Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins, for example—who has been celebrated as the future of the anti-abortion movement—says that “sexual assault actually helps prevent a lot of pregnancies itself because of your body’s natural response.”
Young reactionaries are adopting the same insane and repulsive pseudo-biological arguments that kept the Senate in Democratic hands in 2012.
Meanwhile, a look into the arguments made by Wisconsin Republicans favoring a ban on abortion shows nothing any less repugnant:
It's really remarkable how few groups of people Republicans consider human beings. It's like 10% of the population at most. https://t.co/dO4IZn2GzT— Hunter Felt (@HunterFelt) January 25, 2024
WI State Rep. Nedweski (R): If a woman has an unwanted pregnancy outside of rape and incest, it's her fault.
"I believe in personal responsibility … Most women are not forced to get pregnant … If a woman doesn't want to become pregnant, there are choices involved in that." pic.twitter.com/hiP32k10KI— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) January 25, 2024
Needless to say, the idea that the state should force women to give birth as a punishment for having sex is no more defensible than the idea that victims of sexual assault should be forced to carry pregnancies to term. It’s all the same patriarchal cruelty.