Report Surveys Abortion Restriction Landscape One Year After Akin’s ‘Legitimate Rape’ Comment

The comment was the beginning of the end of Akin’s Senate run. But while it may have cost him an election, it hasn’t stopped Republicans across the country from trying to legislate legal abortion out of existence. On Friday, the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) quantified those efforts in a new report, Shut That Whole Thing Down: A Survey of Abortion Restrictions Even in Cases of Rape. The report looks at abortion legislation in the states and Congress from the first half of 2013 and finds that:

    86 percent (235) of the 273 provisions that politicians introduced in state legislatures to restrict a woman’s access to abortion apply to a woman whose pregnancy resulted from rape.
    71 percent (27) of the 38 state provisions restricting women’s access to abortion enacted by the states apply to a woman whose pregnancy resulted from rape.
    72 percent (18) of the 25 bills introduced in Congress to restrict a woman’s access to abortion apply to a woman whose pregnancy resulted from rape.

These restrictions include forcing a woman who has been raped to carry her pregnancy to term, denying her insurance coverage for an abortion, forcing her to undergo a physically invasive ultrasound or listen to a fetal heartbeat, allowing hospitals to refuse to provide her an abortion, or forcing her to receive inaccurate and biased information designed to dissuade her from having an abortion.

“These restrictions are an insult to women and their health needs,” said NWLC Co-President Marcia D. Greenberger in a statement. “The center’s report finds that many anti-choice politicians continue to spread false assertions about rape in order to justify the draconian restrictions that they advance.”