The bill purports to provide rape exceptions to the state’s ban on abortions, but its ultimate goal is to limit who is able to become pregnant.
With the caveat that people who “lie” about being raped to seek abortion treatment might be sentenced to up to three years in prison, Republican lawmakers in Tennessee this week unveiled a bill that would add a rape exception to the state’s nearly comprehensive abortion prohibition. The legislation, which was first reported on by Jessica Valenti in her abortion news newsletter on Tuesday, would also call for rape victims who receive abortion care—which they can do after undergoing an invasive forensic examination—to save and submit “a sample of the embryonic or fetal tissue extracted during the abortion” to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation for “investigation into the offense.”
Specifically stating that child rape victims who are 12 or younger can get an abortion up to 10 weeks into their pregnancy, while children and adults who are 13 or older can have an abortion at up to eight weeks, the bill was introduced by state senator Ferrell Haile (R) and state representative Iris Rudder (R). It refers to children as young as 12 as “women.”
In essence, the legislation (SB857 in the state Senate and HB1440 in the state House) threatens rape survivors—who are routinely disbelieved—with jail time for seeking medical attention. Even if they are believed and have an abortion, it also warns them that a criminal investigation into their fetal tissue will be conducted.
According to Jalessah Jackson, interim executive director of ARC-Southeast, an abortion fund that works with numerous states, including Tennessee, Haile and Rudder’s proposed rape exception is “intended to be impracticable” and creates yet another hurdle. For survivors, the healthcare system is already unsustainable According to a research published in September of last year, the average cost of sexual assault victims’ medical visits was $4,550 for women who were pregnant and $3,550 for all other victims.
The bill, which anti-abortion Republicans claim is a compassionate gesture, prevents rape victims from coming forward and, maybe, from obtaining medical attention at all. Who would wager three years of their lives on the statistically slim probability of getting the attention and backing of the police? Only 1% of rapes result in criminal convictions.
Rape exceptions are essentially “totally false,” Destini Spaeth, who assists in managing the North Dakota-based abortion fund Women In Need, told Jezebel. They serve as “deterrents” to survivors while being nothing more than “PR for anti-abortion politicians,” dividing allegedly “good” abortions from “bad.”
It’s just another instance of the health care system, the legal system, and the police and judicial systems violating their autonomy, according to Spaeth.
Tennessee’s measure adds to long-standing, structural problems by harming survivors seeking abortion treatment. Sexual assault survivors experience startlingly high rates of incarceration and are frequently threatened with criminality, sometimes upon reporting their attacker. Criminal accusations for pregnancy-related actions, including abortion, frequently include vicitims of violence: When a woman miscarried after being shot in 2019, she was sentenced to prison for fetal homicide.
The Utah legislature passed an abortion prohibition with a rape exception that requires rape victims seeking abortions to disclose their rape to police about the same time that SB587/HB1440 was presented in Tennessee. Given that the vast majority of rapes go unreported, this type of caveat—requiring police enforcement for survivors to get abortion—has grown more prevalent in anti-abortion legislation.
However, even legislators who propose prohibitions without rape exclusions still find methods to support law enforcement at the expense of victims: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said that he would “remove all rapists from the streets” in September 2021 to support his state’s prohibition on abortion and the absence of rape exceptions. He claimed that doing so would increase funds for the same police personnel who do little to nothing to stop sexual assault and regularly commit it themselves.
Legal professionals argued that Abbott’s 2021 abortion ban, which was enforced by enabling anyone to sue anybody who assisted in obtaining an abortion for at least $10,000, allowed rapists to harass and sue their victims and potentially benefit from their pregnancies. Other restrictions on abortion, such as one that would have required “community review” committees to decide whether rape victims qualified for an exception, would be extremely harmful to survivors, particularly child survivors who would be treated as adults under SB857/HB1440: Ohio’s almost complete prohibition on abortions caused a 10-year-old rape victim to go to Indiana for treatment last summer.
With or without exclusions that could potentially land survivors in jail, the effects of abortion bans on survivors—and all pregnant individuals who subsequently become victims of this form of state-perpetuated violence—are the same.
According to Spaeth, abortion is the most vital strategy to safeguard victims, get them out of dangerous circumstances, and prevent them from remaining connected to the abuser. Protecting survivors entails eliminating all restrictions on abortion, not just ineffective exceptions.