Hartford Courant: “Up to 8 percent of sexually assaulted women in the United States become pregnant with the assailant’s child.” That’s really stunning. I had no idea that the percentage was so great. I figure that’s 131 rape pregnancies in Virginia each year. (Via My Left Nutmeg)
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Waldo, you don’t advance your cause by citing specious statistics. That one struck me as a little difficult to believe. I note that no source is cited for this figure (as opposed to the sourcing of inadequate treatment).
I have always heard — can’t remember the source — that pregnancies resulting from rape are exceedingly rare. With just a brief Google search (“pregnancy rape”), I found a figure of 4.7% (http://www.hopeforhealing.org/preg.html). I found no other source claiming greater than 5% with a “pregnancy rate rape” search. Still a “hard case,” to be sure, but substantially different than the Courant’s claim.
I did all I could here, James — I cited one of the nation’s top newspapers, labeled the source of the data, and pointed out that my own surprise at the figure was the source of my interest in posting the number.
A 1997 study by the American Academy of Family Physicians cites a 6% rape pregnancy rate. From reading around, I’ve gathered that the 5% figure is often cited because that’s the percentage of incidents of unprotected sex that result in pregnancy, so the assumption is that the percentage of rapes that result in pregnancy are the same.
The major study on this appears to be Drs. Holmes, Resnick, Kilpatrick and Best’s “Rape-related pregnancy: Estimates and descriptive characteristics from a national sample of women,” which I accessed via my UVa access to Ovid, and is not available via the web. They conducted a three-year longitudinal survey of 4,008 American women and found the rate to be 5% per rape, or 6% per victim. (13.6% of the group were raped and, of them, 19 became pregnant.) They extrapolate their data to figure that there are 32,101 rape-related pregnancies among adult American women each year.
Some of the facts within this study really astounded me. Fully a third (32.4%) didn’t discover that they were pregnant until they reached their second trimester. Over 40% of the pregnancies resulted from multiple assaults, not a single attack. And 21% of the reported rapes occurred among girls 12-15 years old.
Anyhow, that study is from 1996. The Courant may be reporting that figure because of a new study that indicates a higher rate. Alternately, they may be using internals from another study of the state-by-state variation. Given the low raw numbers of incidents (in terms of the overall population), it’s entirely reasonable that Connecticut may have an 8% rate while Vermont could have a 4% rate.
Waldo, you don’t advance your cause by citing specious statistics.
Okay, forgive me if I’m a bit dense here, but exactly what is Waldo’s “cause”?
I was wondering that, too, but decided not to pursue it.
I love how “up to 8 percent” morphs into 10%. Reminds me of how there’s more domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday than any other single day.
And there are 8 million Muslims living in America.
“One in ten” is certainly close enough to 8% for the purpose of a headline, as “a few” may reasonably refer to 3-5, “half” may refer to anywhere from 45%-55%, or “a third” may reasonably mean anywhere from 30-35%. Anybody’s who is too dense to see the 8% figure prominent mentioned in the blog entry’s one and only paragraph is too stupid to worry about, anyhow. :)
“Up to” are great weasel words for stretching the truth, but they make clear that 8% is the upper limit. Yet that wasn’t quite good enough, so you made use of some sort of “license” to add a couple more points to the total. That’s a classic propaganda tactic, but it doesn’t make it any less disingenuous.
All that aside, don’t basic biological and reproductive facts militate against a 1 in 10 shot at pregnancy resulting from rape?
Like the arguments in favor of embryonic stem cell research, the elephant in the living room here is abortion. But I think there are better arguments for keeping that procedure safe and legal than inventing some tripe about how 1 in 10 rape victims is impregnated by her attacker. It’s just not so.
Not necessarily. What some of these studies have attempted to determine is whether there’s a significant correlation between the likelihood of being raped and fertility. Females of all species unconsciously advertise their fertility; human women tend to look, dress, behave, and even smell differently when fertile. So the question that some of these studies have attempted to address is whether this is a cue that rapists subconsciously pick up on in selecting their victim. (Rape may be a crime of violence, rather than a crime of sex, but that does not necessarily prevent those men from following some of their base biological instincts.)
The 1996 study that I’ve cited, which is the only one that I know, clearly concluded that there is not a sufficient correlation, or else they would have found pregnancy rates higher than the 5% per rape (6% per victim) incidence.
So, no, biological factors don’t mitigate against a rate that high — in fact, they’d seem to elevate the rate — but apparently those biological factors aren’t significant enough to affect the incidence of the crime.
Wow, Waldo! You’ve gone from exaggerating the number of pregnancies resulting from rape to making an argument in favor of allowing evidence of the victim’s dress and/or fecundity (bet you don’t see that word used in a sentence every day!). I’m pretty sure that disapprove of both.
I did no such thing. I described a portion of a study that attempted to determine the relationship between rape and pregnancy, advocating no position in my depiction of it. I said nothing of evidence, made no claims as to the legal process, and repeated only what had been considered by the study.