Dickman Cries "Rape!": On The Bizarre New Rape-Pregnancy Paper

You and I, dear reader, have looked at a lot of bad science over the years. Some science was bad because of the stank of woke, some because of fractured philosophy, some because of crusty consensus, an uncountable set because of the reliance of scientists boasting of their wee Ps (“My correlation is causation!”).

But today’s bad science is just plain weird. It’s by a man named Dickman boasting about rape numbers.

Yes, I’m five.

Dickman’s peer-reviewed paper is “Rape-Related Pregnancies in the 14 US States With Total Abortion Bans” in JAMA Internal Medicine by, yes, Dickman, and some three or four women or whatever. Here is the conclusion of Dickman’s “research”:

In the 14 states that implemented total abortion bans following the Dobbs decision, we estimated that 519 981 completed rapes were associated with 64 565 pregnancies during the 4 to 18 months that bans were in effect (Table 2). Of these, an estimated 5586 rape-related pregnancies (9%) occurred in states with rape exceptions, and 58 979 (91%) in states with no exception, with 26 313 (45%) in Texas.

Dickman says nothing about uncompleted rapes.

Dickman also says nothing about rapes or pregnancies in States without restrictions. Which is what makes this paper bizarre. It is nothing but guesses—lousy ones, as we’ll see—of how many pregnancies might occur because of rape. That’s it. And only in states that don’t allow him to make a living.

Dickman is employed at Planned Parenthood in a state with restrictions. He himself “reported that he is a plaintiff in several lawsuits challenging abortion restrictions in Montana.” He didn’t say how many lives inside women he himself snuffed out. But he clearly has an interest in the topic.

Dickman got his absurd numbers in the following way. First by guessing the number of rapes, and then guessing the chance a rape would lead to pregnancy.

Dickman’s first problem is the definition of rape, which he expanded to include non-rapes. He included not only forced vaginal penetration, which makes sense, but also drug or alcohol “facilitated” penetrations, which does not. Worse, his numbers are based on responses to some bad survey. Regret and bad choices are not rape. We’ll come back to these numbers.

Dickman’s second problem is the chance of getting pregnant from rape. He uses a whopping 12.4%! According to one paper, about 5% of rapes result in pregnancy in women “of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45)”. A tighter estimate gives a maximum of 9% on a woman’s most fertile day (down to about 0% on her least fertile days; averaging about 5%).

Dickman conjured his ridiculous number by assuming a chance of getting pregnant from multiple rapes over a woman’s entire lifetime! I suppose there could have been some women over the period he looked at who were raped more than once, but there cannot have been many, and likely were none. This mistake alone makes his numbers 250% too high.

Dickman likely didn’t know that the FBI said there were just under 140,000 rapes reported in 2019 in the whole of the once-United States. That number surely rose after the Summer of Pandering and Fear the following year, and the years after, because all violent crime rose. So let’s say 150,000 rapes in 2023.

Dickman’s own math, using more accurate guesses, would make this 150,000 x 0.05 = 7,500 annual pregnancies caused by rape. In the whole of the USA. Yet Dickman claimed 65,000 in just 14 states! A crude population-based guess (assuming equal chances for rape for each state) for just those 14 states would be about 1,800 rape-induced pregnancies per year.

Dickman is therefore wrong by about 36 times too high. There is some hand waving in this, because Dickman counted those months new abortion restrictions were in place (from 4 to 18 months), and I did yearly. And there is some proportion of true rapes that aren’t reported, which would push that 1,800 a bit higher. But whatever. His numbers are preposterous.

Dickman did this “research” because why? Because propaganda, as this CNN article confirms.

It’s difficult to measure how often sexual assault occurs, and Dickman acknowledges that the study includes many statistical assumptions. But part of the work is to raise awareness of a stigmatized issue and take an honest look at who may be affected by abortion bans and potential exceptions.

“Dickman acknowledges” is a severe understatement, as we’ve seen. Yet there it is, the admission that the “research” is propaganda. That’s what “to raise awareness” means. It is rank ham-fisted advocacy; it is politics and not science.

Dickman Dickman Dickman.

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