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| Abby Hafer |
However, rape exemptions to abortion bans generally don’t work, largely because they cannot work. For this reason, journalists and other opinion-makers should not allow politicians to get away with this idea. Journalists and others need to ask politicians and opinion-makers what they actually mean — in short, what would it take to exercise a rape exemption? How would it work?
Take, for example, the matter of access to abortion services — that is, the ability to actually get the actual, physical abortion that the rape exemption makes you hypothetically entitled to have.
As we will see in the following two real-world examples, under-aged girls who had been raped still could not get abortions in an abortion-ban state, even though it technically had a rape exemption.
Why? Because of the lack of access to an abortion.
Lack of access makes rape exemptions meaningless in real-world cases. These cases have already happened.
Here’s the first example — a young teen in Mississippi became pregnant after rape.
Mississippi has a rape exemption to its abortion ban. Her parents found this out. However, her parents also discovered that there are no abortion providers left in Mississippi. In other words, she had no access to an abortion in the entire state of Mississippi, even though she was hypothetically entitled to one, courtesy of the rape exemption to that state’s abortion ban.
Further exploration showed that this child could also not get an abortion in Louisiana, where her parents tried next. Then it turned out that one of Mississippi’s former clinics had relocated to New Mexico, but that was too far. The closest clinic that the teen’s parents could find was a Planned Parenthood clinic in Illinois.
However, this then leads to the add-on problems of time and money. To get an abortion in Illinois, a person in Mississippi would have to drive for nine to 9.5 hours, one way, which would mean needing money for a hotel, gas and food, not to mention money for the abortion itself.
In the case of this particular teen, the parents were able to get the money and get an abortion for their teen but not due to Mississippi’s rape exemption. They simply travelled and paid many expenses that should have been unnecessary — indeed, expenses that would have been unnecessary had rape exemptions actually performed what is said to be their intended function.
As an added irony, the rape suspects in this case were charged with sexual battery. In many states with rape exemptions, including Mississippi, it is necessary to file a police report, which is what happened in this case, and the police believed the report was enough to charge the suspects. However, this detail is useless, given that no abortions could be had in the entire state of Mississippi anyway.
In the second example, the matter of access became even more complex. In a different case in Mississippi, a 13-year-old was raped by a stranger.
The first complicating factor was that the child was so young that she did not know how babies are made, and she apparently did not realize that a crime had been committed against her. The child, with the pseudonym of Ashley, was raped in the autumn of 2022, but she didn’t tell anyone about the attack.
So of course there was no immediate filing of a police report. This means that the child Ashley would not have qualified for Mississippi’s rape exemption despite having been raped, simply because she was so young that she did not understand what rape and pregnancy actually are.
In fact, Ashley didn’t find out that she was pregnant until the following January when she was hospitalized for copious vomiting.
The second complicating factor was that her parents also did not know that there was a rape exemption to the state’s abortion ban.
The third complicating factor, again, was access. This became the central problem because there were no abortion providers left in Mississippi.
It turned out that the nearest abortion provider to Ashley was in Chicago, which is a nine-hour drive away. Ashley’s mother could not get the time off and could not pay for accommodations, gas and food, in addition to the cost of the abortion.
As a result, Ashley, at 14 years of age, had to give birth in the summer of 2023.
Both these examples show that rape exemptions to abortion bans are meaningless. When abortions are banned, abortion clinics shut down. When abortion clinics shut down, there is no access to abortion in that state.
So a rape exemption to an abortion ban is useless to the woman and her family, and the only purpose it serves is to allow conservative lawmakers to seem a little less cruel. They should not get away with seeming that way.
As I stated at the beginning of this article, journalists and opinion-makers should not allow lawmakers who espouse this ridiculous idea to get away with it. They need to be pressed with a simple followup question: “How would it work?”
This is part two of a series. Part one: Rape exemptions to abortion laws, or why women shouldn’t have sex for fun.
Dr. Abby Hafer is a biologist, educator and writer with a doctorate in zoology from Oxford University. She teaches human anatomy and physiology at Curry College. She is the co-author of Bill H.471, a bill in the Massachusetts legislature that requires that all science taught in public schools be based on peer-reviewed science. Learn more at professionaldebunker.com and reach her at ahafer@curry.edu.
The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author’s firm, its clients, LexisNexis Canada, Law360 Canada or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.
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