What percentage of women abort due to being raped?
Executive summary
Multiple national studies and reporting syntheses show that abortions directly attributed to rape make up a very small share of all abortions—commonly cited at about 1 percent—while the outcomes of pregnancies that result from rape vary (some are carried to term, some end in abortion), and the total picture is clouded by underreporting and differing definitions of “rape-related” pregnancy [1] [2] [3].
1. The headline figure: about 1 percent of abortions cite rape as the reason
Several compilations used in policy and media discussions report that roughly 1 percent of people who obtain abortions list rape as the reason, and that figure is repeatedly cited in advocacy and informational materials [1] [2]; one pro-life summary specifically states survey results showing approximately one percent of women reported “rape” as the reason for their abortion [2].
2. But rape-related pregnancies have different outcomes—about half end in abortion in older national samples
Studies that begin with pregnancies known to be the result of rape find different proportions: a national probability sample published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and summarized on PubMed reported that among women who became pregnant from rape, about 50 percent underwent abortion while roughly 32 percent carried to term and about 6 percent placed the infant for adoption, with the rest experiencing spontaneous losses or other outcomes [3] [4].
3. Why those two numbers can both be true: different denominators, different questions
The apparent contradiction—1 percent of abortions being due to rape versus about 50 percent of rape-caused pregnancies ending in abortion—stems from asking different questions: one asks “of all abortions, how many were because of rape?” while the other asks “of pregnancies caused by rape, how many were terminated?”; both are supported in the reporting: the 1 percent figure is used in abortion-statistics summaries [1] [2] and the 50 percent termination rate comes from a national study of rape-related pregnancies [3] [4].
4. Large-scale, recent analyses emphasize scale of rape-related pregnancy but not how many ended in abortion
Recent analyses estimating the number of pregnancies resulting from sexual violence since policy changes calculate tens of thousands of rape-related pregnancies in states with abortion restrictions (about 64,000–65,000 in 14 states during study periods), but those studies focus on incident pregnancies and access barriers rather than producing a single national percentage of abortions performed for rape [5] [6] [7] [8].
5. Major caveats: underreporting of sexual assault, legal barriers, and differences in data collection
All figures carry major caveats: sexual assaults are substantially underreported (estimates cited note that only a minority are reported to authorities) and reporting requirements or legal exceptions affect whether survivors can obtain legal abortions in their states, complicating any effort to translate rape-related pregnancy counts into the share of abortions caused by rape; policy briefs and analyses warn that exceptions are uneven and in practice often unusable [9] [10] [8].
6. Bottom line: a small share of abortions are attributed to rape, but the human scale of rape-related pregnancy is significant and undercounted
Straight numerical answers supported by the provided sources: among all abortions, about 1 percent are reported as due to rape in common statistical summaries [1] [2], while among pregnancies known to be caused by rape roughly half end in abortion according to a national sample [3] [4]; translating those findings into a single national percentage is constrained by underreporting of assault, different survey questions, and changing legal access across states [9] [10] [8].