Abortion enthusiast Jessica Valenti “has spent the last two decades” writing in favor of all things abortion, which now includes a book titled Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win. As this is Valenti’s eighth book, her diatribe continues, but her “facts” come from curated collages of abortion advocacy and, in my case, outright falsehood. Journalism it’s not.  

In hawking her book, Valenti — like most abortion extremists — justifies all intentional abortion by highlighting the issue of rape. But in this book, she lies about not only my point of view but my record. Valenti cuts a sliver of a quote out of context to make a false and cruel accusation, taken from the context of a detailed discussion about how to understand sexual assault and abortion while skipping inconvenient facts that undercut the narrative.

This is a painful topic, but as the abortion lobby forces sexual assault survivors into the debate, it’s sadly often demanded of pro-life advocates who love them both — a hurting mother and a child in the womb.

In an excerpt of Valenti’s book that appeared in Rolling Stone, she writes:

Anti-abortion lawmakers and activists also claim that pregnancy after rape is rare — a claim designed to hide their utter cruelty, and to pivot when asked about abortion ban exceptions. Some even say that women can’t get pregnant from a rape at all. Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins — who has been celebrated as the future of the anti-abortion movement — says that “sexual assault actually helps prevent a lot of pregnancy itself because of your body’s natural response.” (Emphasis added) 

Not only do I know that women can get pregnant from rape, but earlier this year, I paid for that fact to be on a billboard in New York City’s Times Square.

Valenti deceptively edited a line in a 2023 podcast, “Boom Clap,” in which I joined the hosts for a wide-ranging conversation on where the abortion issue was post-Dobbs, noting as part of a conversation that went for over an hour that the atrocity of rape is horrific and something not to be addressed flippantly. 

This subject comes up at every campus stop and in many media interviews. It can’t be ignored, nor should it be. 

First, the number of abortions that are committed for that reason: In the podcast, I noted that less than 2 percent of all abortions relate to rape and incest. USA Today put it like this in 2019: “Just 1% of women obtain an abortion because they became pregnant through rape, and less than 0.5% do so because of incest, according to the Guttmacher Institute.”

I also said that many are confused about how often pregnancy happens as a result of rape. With all the deceptive reporting going on, some think all or most rape victims become pregnant and consider abortion. The actual number that become pregnant is about 5 percent.

CNN concurs, reporting, “Generally, a single act of a rape has about a 5% chance of resulting in pregnancy among victims aged 12 to 45 who are not on birth control, according to American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology (ACOG) figures.” 

I also mentioned that the horrific stress of the event can be a factor in conception. Stress is a well-known factor in whether someone does or does not get pregnant. And any woman who has been pregnant remembers the warnings of our mothers and aunts, telling us to cut down on stress early in pregnancy. 

Here is the crux of the deception, from the line in full in the podcast, with her edit noted, “The horror of the sexual assault actually helps prevent a lot of pregnancies itself because of your body’s natural response to the atrocity that has happened.” Valenti willfully ignored my direct statements in the podcast about people conceived in rape to make her false case.

For pro-life advocates, though, this tragic issue isn’t about math. 

The number of people conceived doesn’t change the worth of the people conceived, and I’ve hosted many with such origin stories on my podcast. I and my team have lobbied for legal protections for all, no matter how their lives began, and we’ve featured them in a national ad campaign this summer, which launched in Times Square. It included people conceived in rape talking about how much they value their lives and mothers who choose life for their babies despite surviving sexual assault. In fact, about 7 in 10 women pregnant from rape will choose life. You can learn more at AlmostAborted.life.

Valenti’s meager journalistic skills seem to have missed what corporate media know well about me — that I care about mothers and the people conceived in rape.

Consider this in The New Yorker: “(P)urists in the movement have never considered exceptions to be morally sound. Kristan Hawkins, the president of the nonprofit Students for Life of America, has decried such provisions for ‘determining another person’s value based on something other than his or her status as an innocent member of the human family.’” 

And Valenti missed this headline at NPR: “Anti-Abortion-Rights Groups Push GOP To Rethink Rape And Incest Exceptions.” Or this at The Guardian: “No-exception laws, once too harsh even for anti-abortion Republicans, gain traction across U.S.” We are not hard to find. 

Valenti lies with cool imprecision, but what do you expect from a self-described feminist “writer?” Apparently, she means fiction. The bald falsehood that I am an example of a pro-life individual who believes “women can’t get pregnant from a rape at all” combined with the deceptive editing = a lie.  

In light of this painful and false slur, attorneys for Students for Life of America are sending a cease-and-desist letter to Valenti’s publisher to end the promotion and distribution of the clearly flawed book, demanding she make a correction — including in outlets where she made the false statements to promote the book.

I hope by highlighting these lies and demanding legal action, we can start to have honest conversations in America about pregnancies that occur after rape. It’s high time we talked about the gaps in resources and the support needed for women who survive sexual assault and are pregnant. It’s time we talked about friends like Ryan Bomberger and Rebecca Kiessling who were conceived in rape, as their lives matter. It’s time we recognize that the women who survive sexual assault, become pregnant, and courageously choose life for their child deserve praise and support. Instead, they are routinely discounted and ignored in the media and at pro-abortion rallies because they don’t fit in with the people cherry-picked for Valenti’s narrative.

At Students for Life, we reject prejudice against people based on their age, sex, skin color, stage of development, parental income, and the events of conception. We reject the abortion lobby’s mantra that some children are second-class citizens because of their first day or the sins of their fathers. Each life has value unique to himself or herself. We work to support women in moments of crisis through Standing with You, which has been connecting women and young couples to the help and support they need for over 10 years. 

The pro-life generation will fight for the human beings in the womb no matter their origin story, but don’t buy the lies Valenti is selling. She really is just trying to sell books. 

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Kristan Hawkins is president of Students for Life of America and Students for Life Action, with more than 1,300 groups on middle and high school, college and university, medical and law school campuses in all 50 states. Follow her @KristanHawkins or subscribe to her podcast, Explicitly Pro-Life.