Abortion seekers ‘seven times’ more likely to be abused
US: Women seeking an abortion are seven times more likely to report
physical or sexual abuse at the hands of their partners than the US
national average for domestic violence, a study published Monday found.
The study comes as a Republican senatorial candidate triggered a
firestorm of criticism after he suggested that “legitimate rape” rarely
causes pregnancy.
Explaining his complete opposition to abortions, even in the instance
of rape, Representative Todd Akin said pregnancy from rape was rare
because of biological reactions to “legitimate rape.” “First of all,
from what I understand from doctors, (pregnancy from rape) is really
rare,” Akin said in an interview widely distributed by Democrats.
“If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut
that whole thing down.” A previous study found that five percent of rape
incidents result in a pregnancy among women of reproductive age and
estimated that rape causes more than 32,000 pregnancies in the United
States every year.
Monday's study by the Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit concerned
with reproductive health and abortion rights, said poverty, relationship
problems and disruptive events such as losing a job led women to
terminate pregnancies.
The study aimed to help understand why poor women are far more likely
to terminate a pregnancy than their more affluent counterparts.
Poor women accounted for 42 percent of the 1.21 million abortions
performed in the United States in 2008, up from 27 percent of the 1.31
million abortions performed in 2000.
Seven percent of the women surveyed by Guttmacher after seeking an
abortion reported that they had been physically or sexually abused by
the man with whom they became pregnant. National surveys have found that
slightly more than one percent of US women report abuse at the hands of
their partners.
Poor women, meanwhile, were twice as likely to say they had been
physically or sexually abused by the man who impregnated them than
abortion-seekers with higher incomes (9.3 percent versus 4.4 percent.)
The researchers cautioned that these numbers should be considered a
“conservative” measure of the degree of abuse because women often don't
acknowledge that they've been forced into a sexual act or physically
hurt by their partners.
Nearly 9,500 women completed an anonymous, four-page questionnaire
distributed by the staff of 95 facilities providing abortions in 2008.
Some 20 percent of respondents -- and 25 percent of poor women --
said they had been unemployed for at least a month and 14 percent said
they'd fallen behind on their rent or mortgage.
Relationship problems were also common -- 16 percent said they had
separated from their partner or husband in the past year while six
percent said their partner had been jailed.
Ten percent of respondents said they'd had a baby in the past 12
months and that number rose to 14 percent among women living below the
poverty line.
About half of the abortion patients were using contraception in the
month they got pregnant, but poor women were less likely to have used
birth control than those who were better-off.
“Most women accessing abortion services in the USA had dealt with at
least one disruptive event in the 12 months preceding the abortion,” the
study concluded. The study was published in the Journal of Family
Planning and Reproductive Health Care. AFP
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