What Percentage of Raped Women Become Pregnant?

What percentage of raped women become pregnant? Answer: nobody knows.

Strike that. Many people claim to know, but the actual rate is hidden from us, though it can be estimated with considerable uncertainty.

Maybe the better question is, are pregnancy rates higher, the same, or smaller for raped women than for non-raped women? Answer: nobody knows.

Well, we’re getting nowhere fast, because folks think they have this one pegged, too. So confident are they, that asking the question is seen by them as sacrilegious. Todd Akin (during his Senate run) learned this the hard way when he said that rates were smaller, which is not the desired answer.

Poor Akin paid for his apostasy, as you would have thought everybody knows. But Celeste Greig of California Republican Party Headquarters strangely didn’t, because in early March she unwisely answered the second question, too. Unlike Akin, she gave the true answer, which is that nobody knows. She said,

Granted, the percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it’s an act of violence, because the body is traumatized. I don’t know what percentage of pregnancies are due to the violence of rape. Because of the trauma the body goes through, I don’t know what percentage of pregnancy results from the act.

This is a good answer. Pregnancy rates for a session of intercourse are low no matter what, rape or non-rape. Rape is (nearly always) traumatic. Trauma by definition affects the body. It is plausible therefore to suggest that rape changes the likelihood of conception. She doesn’t claim to know by how much the likelihood is changed, if at all.

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