One year before Roe, in September 2021, the state enacted SB 8, a six-week ban enforced with costly civil penalties. SB 8 also lacks a rape exception; when reporters asked Gov. Greg Abbott (R) about this in 2021, he simply pledged to “eliminate rape.” Of course, we know he didn’t: Last January, researchers estimated there had been 26,300 rape-induced pregnancies in Texas since 2022.
The same research found that, between June 2022 and January 2024, in 14 states that had banned abortion, an estimated 519,981 rapes “were associated with 64,565 pregnancies.” Of these pregnancies, 91% occurred in states with no rape exception, and 45% occurred in Texas. When those pregnant victims are children, the barriers they face to access abortion are exponentially greater, depending on their support systems. “For young people living in abusive households, disclosing sexual activity or pregnancy can trigger physical or emotional abuse, including direct physical or sexual violence, or being thrown out of the home,” Ashley Coffield, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi, said in 2023 when Tennessee rolled out a bill criminalizing the act of helping minors travel for abortion.
Child sexual abuse victims are an especially vulnerable demographic under abortion bans; many adults struggle to understand and navigate these laws, or how to invoke confusing, purposefully ineffective rape exceptions. Within days of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling, a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio had to travel to Indiana for abortion care; Ohio doctors later reported being forced to turn away at least two other underage rape victims under Ohio’s then-active ban. In August 2023, Time reported on the story of a 13-year-old in Mississippi who was impregnated by rape and started the seventh grade with a baby.
Research further shows that children and young people’s pregnancies are at higher risk. “While their body has the capacity to be pregnant, their ability to carry that pregnancy to term without having bodily harm happen to them during the pregnancy or the delivery is much lower,” Dr. Tracey Wilkinson, an associate professor of pediatrics and affiliate professor of obstetric and gynecology at Indiana University, told the Chronicle. “Just because puberty has occurred doesn’t mean their body is capable of carrying a pregnancy to term. … Think about the trauma of delivering a child when you are a child. Their brains are still developing. Their bodies are still developing. This is a huge deal.”
The newspaper stressed that 100 minors is likely an undercount. The figure comes from “information about out-of-state abortions from a national data exchange called the State and Territorial Exchange of Vital Events” (STEVE), per the Chronicle, and a spokesperson from Texas’ Health Department clarified that not every state provides this data. Jane’s Due Process, a Texas-based nonprofit offering funding support to teens traveling for abortion, told the newspaper that the organization has seen a surge in demand since Texas’ bans took effect.
In 2023, the first full year post-Dobbs, 171,300 patients had to travel out-of-state to receive in-clinic abortions. Texas anti-abortion officials across the state are now trying to crack down on abortion-related travel. Some counties have passed largely symbolic but still dangerous ordinances banning such travel, while the state of Texas appears set on waging legal war against out-of-state abortion providers: In December, Texas sued a New York-based doctor who allegedly mailed a Dallas woman abortion pills, which is currently protected under New York’s shield law. Texas is also reportedly recruiting abusive men to snitch on their partners’ abortions and trigger similar lawsuits against out-of-state providers. The goal appears to be trapping people under the state’s abortion laws, posing the greatest threat to children.
