A lot of people are citing the Holmes et al (1996) paper that found a 5% pregnancy rate among rape survivors from 12 to 45 years of age. This is a great study that performed several telephone interviews with 4008 participants over three years to determine rates of rape (413 individuals experienced 616 completed rapes, a lifetime incidence of over 13% in this sample) and rates of pregnancy from rape (20 were reported from 19 individuals, or 5%).
In a separate study, Wilcox et al (2001) draw from their amazing prospective dataset from the 1980s where they asked women who were trying to conceive to collect urine every day. They were able to detect hormones, and thus pregnancies and fetal losses, because of these daily urine collections. Work on this dataset from Wilcox, Baird, and others represents the gold standard for our understanding of early pregnancy, fetal loss, and the timing of implantation in the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle. In this paper, the authors are able to show what the possible pregnancy rates are for a given day in the menstrual cycle, taking into account the normal variation many women experience in the length of their cycle and timing of ovulation:
What they find is that the rate of pregnancy on any given day is about 3.1%, a little lower than the Holmes et al estimate. What Wilcox et al also does well is demonstrate first how the vulnerability to get pregnant varies across the cycle, but also how it is most certainly not zero at the times many of us assume we are not fertile. I’m not sure I am convinced the difference in the rates in these two studies is meaningful, and instead I suspect it is just a result of natural variation based on participant sample. Wilcox et al themselves suggest that the higher number for Holmes et al is a result of methodological differences. But only more studies will help us settle this.
So, rape and consensual sex have the same pregnancy rate. This means that of those 64,080 US rapes in 2004-2005, minus the 15% of rapes that are of children under the age of 12 which gets us to 54,468 rapes of almost all reproductively-aged women, somewhere between 1,689 (3.1%) to 2,723 (5%) pregnancies from rape could have occurred in that year alone. Somewhere around half of those women were probably using some form of hormonal contraception, so let’s hope the numbers are even lower. Unfortunately, access to emergency contraception is still a challenge for rape survivors who go to hospitals, particularly Catholic hospitals, to receive treatment (Smugar et al. 2000).
Buy on AliExpress.com
