page_title: Pregnancy from rape
section_title: Rape in war and conflict
hierarchical_section_title: Pregnancy from rape / Rape in war and conflict
caption_attribution_description: English: A Chinese girl from one of the Japanese Army's 'comfort battalions' sits on a stretcher, awaiting interrogation at a camp in Rangoon. The uniform and insignia on the shoulder of the man next to her indicate that he is a Flying Officer in the Royal Air Force.
context_page_description: Pregnancy is a potential result of rape. It has been studied in the context of war, particularly as a tool for genocide, as well as other unrelated contexts, such as rape by a stranger, statutory rape, incest, and underage pregnancy. The current scientific consensus is that rape is at least as likely to lead to pregnancy as consensual sexual intercourse, with some studies suggesting rape may actually result in higher rates of pregnancy than consensual intercourse.
  Rape can cause difficulties during and after pregnancy, with potential negative consequences for both the victim and a resulting child. Medical treatment following a rape includes testing for, preventing, and managing pregnancy. A woman who becomes pregnant after a rape may face a decision about whether to raise the child, to make an adoption plan, or to have an abortion. In some countries where abortion is illegal after rape and incest, over 90% of pregnancies in girls age 15 and under are due to rape by family members.
  The false belief that pregnancy can almost never result from rape was widespread for centuries.
context_section_description: Rape has been used as a weapon of psychological warfare for centuries, to terrorize, humiliate, and undermine the morale of the enemy. Rape was also used as an act of ethnic cleansing to produce babies that share the perpetrators' ethnicity. Forced pregnancy has been noted in places including Bangladesh, Darfur, and Bosnia. More broadly, pregnancy commonly results from wartime rape that was perpetrated without the intention of impregnating the enemy, as has been found in conflicts in East Timor, Liberia, Kosovo, and Rwanda.  Gita Sahgal of Amnesty International commented that, rather than being primarily about "spoils of war" or sexual gratification, rape is often used in ethnic conflicts as a way for attackers to perpetuate social control and redraw ethnic boundaries. Children may be born to women and girls forced to "marry" abductors and occupiers; this happened in the Indonesian occupation of East Timor and in the Lord's Resistance Army's conflict in Uganda.
  Rape during war is recognized under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1820 as a war crime and a crime against humanity. "Forced pregnancy" is specifically enumerated as a war crime and crime against humanity in the Rome Statute, which was the "first international criminal tribunal ever officially to criminalize forced pregnancy".
  Children born as the result of wartime rape may be identified with the enemy and grow up stigmatized and excluded by their communities; they may be denied basic rights or even killed before reaching adulthood. Children are particularly at risk for such abuse when they are visibly identifiable as sharing half their ethnicity with the occupying forces, as in the case of half-Arab children of Darfuri women raped by janjaweed soldiers as part of the war in Darfur.  Children of war rape are also at risk due to neglect by traumatized mothers unable to provide sufficient care.
caption: Forced prostitution was used by the Japanese Army during World War II. Rangoon, Burma. 8 August 1945. A young ethnic Chinese woman from one of the Imperial Japanese Army's "comfort battalions"  is interviewed by an Allied officer.
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