Utilisatrice:Bédévore/Grossesse issue du viol

À plusieurs périodes de l'histoire, les enfants issus d'un viol étaient tués par leurs mères. Sous l'Antiquité et au Moyen Âge, ces infanticides n'étaient pas interdits (néanmoins, les mères devaient faire pénitence en Europe médiévale)^[6].

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Pendant des siècles, une croyance répandue dans les milieux médicaux et juridique voulait que le viol ne puisse entraîner de grossesse^[7],[8]. Galien, médecin grec de l'Antiquité, croyait qu'une femme devait éprouver du plaisir pour émettre une « graine » et devenir enceinte ; or, ce plaisir était absent d'une relation non consentie^[9]. L'opinion de Galien a influencé l'appréciation des faits en Angleterre médiévale puis en Amérique à l'ère coloniale^[9]. Les processus de reproduction chez les femmes étaient, à bien des égards, examinés sous l'angle de ceux prévalant chez les hommes : les scientifiques supposaient que le fonctionnement des organes féminins reflétait, de manière inversée, celui des hommes ; par conséquent, ils estimaient que l'orgasme féminin était nécessaire à la conception des enfants^[7].

Cette idée a persisté des siècles et, en Europe au Moyen Âge, la croyance voulait toujours qu'une grossesse était impossible sans consentement ; de fait, un homme accusé de viol pouvait invoquer la grossesse de la plaignante comme moyen de défense judiciaire^[8]. Ce préjugé est entériné dans les textes juridiques britanniques médiévaux Fleta (en) et Britton. Ce dernier déclare :

« Si le défendeur confesse son acte, mais déclare qu'à ce moment-là la femme a conçu un enfant de ses œuvres et peut le prouver, alors notre volonté est qu'il ne soit pas condamné car une femme ne saurait concevoir si elle n'a pas consenti^[10]. »

Corinne Saunders, spécialiste de littérature médiévale, reconnaît qu'il est complexe de déterminer la portée du préjugé voulant qu'une grossesse suppose le consentement ; néanmoins, elle conclut que cette idée a influencé « au moins une partie des juges », se référant à une affaire de 1313 dans le Kent^[11]. Cet avis est toutefois contredit par le Dragmaticon, rédigé au XII^e siècle par Guillaume de Conches : il cite Geoffroy V d'Anjou (père du monaque Henri II), qui, s'opposant aux idées de Galien, déclare qu'il ne fait aucun doute que certains viols conduisent à des naissances. Guillaume reconnaît ce fait mais il affirme que cela démontre seulement que certaines femmes, voire toutes, éprouvent un plaisir charnel involontaire lors du viol malgré leur absence de consentement par la raison^[12]. Cependant, le même raisonnement avait cours pour expliquer la rareté présumée des naissances parmi les femmes prostituées^[12].

À la fin du XVIII^e siècle, les scientifiques ne s'accordent plus sur la thèse que la grossesse serait impossible sans plaisir, même si cette opinion est encore répandue^[13]. Un document juridique britannique, le Traité sur les plaidoyers de la Couronne (en), rejette les conséquences légales et la réalité biologique de cette croyance :

« En outre, certains ont avancé qu'il ne saurait y avoir de viol si une femme conçoit un enfant à ce moment-là ; car la rumeur prétend que si elle n'avait pas consenti, elle n'aurait pu concevoir. Or, cet avis semble fort critiquable, non seulement parce que la violence antérieure ne s'efface pas en cas de consentement ultérieur, mais aussi à cause de la durée nécessaire pour s'assurer de l'absence de grossesse : en pareil cas, le transgresseur ne pouvait passer en jugement tant que la grossesse ou son absence n'avait pas été assurée. Aussi les principes de cette notion méritent-ils d'être remis en question.^[8],[14] »

En 1814, le traité juridique britannique Elements of Medical Jurisprudence de Samuel Farr (en) avance que la conception d'un enfant ne peut « probablement » pas avoir lieu si une femme n'éprouve pas de « plaisir » et qu'en conséquence un « viol absolu » n'est pas de nature à entraîner une grossesse^[7],[15]. Toutefois, lors d'un procès en 1820 sur le Territoire de l'Arkansas, un homme a plaidé non coupable face à une accusation de viol parce que la victime était devenue enceinte ; or, le tribunal a rejeté cet argument :

« L'ancien mythe selon lequel un viol n'a pas pu avoir lieu si une femme conçoit, parce que cette grossesse suppose son consentement, a fait long feu. Il est bien connu que la fécondation ne dépend pas de la conscience ni de la volonté d'une femme. Si ses organes utérins sont dans un état propices à la fécondation, celle-ci est susceptible de se produire aussi bien [lors d'un viol] que dans une relation sexuelle consentie^[16]. »

Plus récemment, des opposants à la légalité de l'avortement ont soutenu qu'une grossesse issue d'un viol est un phénomène rare^[17],[2]. Dans un article publié en 1972, Fred Mecklenburg (en), médecin et militant anti-IVG, déclare que la grossesse issue d'un viol est « d'une extrême rareté » et il ajoute qu'une femme exposée au traumatisme d'un viol « n'ovulera pas, même si son cycle y est propice »^[18]. Selon Blythe Bernhard dans The Washington Post en 2012, « l'article de Mecklenburg a influencé deux générations de militants anti-IVG qui ont espéré présenter des arguments médicaux permettant d'interdire tout avortement, sans exceptions »^[19].

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De grandes variations se présentent sur le nombre de grossesses issues d'un viol^[20],[21].

Certains organismes et des personnalités politiques soutenant une position anti-avortement ont affirmé qu'une grossesse ne procède que très rarement d'un viol et que l'intérêt pratique d'inscrire ces exceptions dans des lois relatives à l'IVG est marginal voire inexistant^{[22],[17],[23]}.

Aux États-Unis en 1996, au terme d'une étude longitudinale sur trois années auprès de plus de 4 000 femmes américaines, le médecin Melisa Holmes déduit à partir des données que les relations sexuelles forcées entraînent plus de 32 000 grossesses chaque année sur le territoire national^[24]. Cette étude de 1996, portant sur 44 cas de grossesses issues d'un viol, estime que 0,5 % des victimes de viol en âge en procréer (entre 12 et 45 ans) deviennent enceintes^[24],[25]. Une autre analyse, en 1987, établit également à 5 % le taux de grossesses issues d'un viol parmi les étudiantes américaines âgées de 18 à 24 ans^[26]. En 2005, une enquête propose une fourchette comprise entre 3 % et 5 %^[27].

Felicia H. Stewart, médecin, et James Trussell, économiste, estiment que les 333 000 agressions et viols signalés aux États-Unis en 1998 ont entraîné 25 000 grossesses, dont 22 000 auraient pu être évitées via des traitements rapides, comme la contraception d'urgence^[28]. D'autres analyses proposent un taux nettement moindre. Ainsi, l'organisation caritative Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) implantée à Washington indique une prévalence bien plus faible, calculée à partir des estimations de l'Enquête nationale sur les victimes de crime (issue du département de la Justice) en 2005 : selon le RAINN, sur la moyenne annuelle des 64 080 viols commis en 2004 et 2005, 5 % ont conduit à une grossesse, soit 3 204 grossesses issues d'un viol chaque année^[21].

A study of Ethiopian adolescents who reported being raped found that 17% subsequently became pregnant,^[29] and rape crisis centres in Mexico reported the figure the rate of pregnancy from rape at 15–18%.^[30] Estimates of rape-related pregnancy rates may be inaccurate since the crime is under-reported, resulting in some pregnancies from rape not being recorded as such,^[27] or alternately, social pressure may mean some rapes are not reported if no pregnancy results.

Most studies suggest that conception rates are independent of whether insemination is due to rape or consensual sex.^[31]

Some analysts have suggested that the rate of conception may be higher from insemination due to rape.^{[32],[33],[34],[35]} Psychologist Robert L. Smith states that some studies have reported "unusually high rates of conception following rape".^[32] He cites a paper by C.A. Fox and Beatrice Fox, reporting that biologist Alan Sterling Parkes had speculated in personal correspondence that "there is a high conception rate in rape, where hormonal release, due to fear or anger, could produce reflex ovulation".^[33] Smith also cites veterinary scientist Wolfgang Jöchle, who "proposed that rape may induce ovulation in human females".^[34],[35] Literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall and economist Tiffani Gottschall argued in a 2003 Human Nature article that previous studies of rape-pregnancy statistics were not directly comparable to pregnancy rates from consensual intercourse, because the comparisons were largely uncorrected for such factors as the use of contraception. Adjusting for these factors, they estimated that rapes are about twice as likely to result in pregnancies (7.98%) as "consensual, unprotected penile-vaginal intercourse" (2–4%). They discuss a variety of possible explanations and advance the hypothesis that rapists tend to target victims with biological "cues of high fecundity" or subtle indications of ovulation.^[3]

In contrast, psychologists Tara Chavanne and Gordon Gallup Jr., found that women in the ovulatory phase of their menstrual cycle reduce risk-taking behaviors, which could theoretically reduce the likelihood of rape during fertile periods.^[36] Anthropologist Daniel Fessler disputed these findings, saying, "analysis of conception rates reveals that the probability of conception following rape does not differ from that following consensual coitus".^[31]

Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have hypothesized that causing pregnancy by rape may be a mating strategy in humans, as a way for males to ensure the survival of their genes by passing them on to future generations.^[37] Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer are key popularizers of this hypothesis. They assert that most rape victims are women of childbearing age and that many cultures treat rape as a crime against the victim's husband. They state that rape victims suffer less emotional distress when they are subjected to more violence, and that married women and women of childbearing age experience greater psychological distress after a rape than do girls, single women or post-menopausal women.^[38] Rape-pregnancy rates are crucial in evaluating these theories, because a high or low pregnancy rate from rape would determine whether such adaptations are favored or disfavored by natural selection.^[3]

In 1995–1996, the journal Family Planning Perspectives published a study by the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual health research and policy organization, on statutory rape (sexual intercourse with a minor) and resulting pregnancies. It drew on other research^[39],[40] to conclude that "at least half of all babies born to minor women are fathered by adult men", and that "although relatively small proportions of 13–14-year-olds have had intercourse, those who become sexually active at an early age are especially likely to have experienced coercive sex: Seventy-four percent of women who had intercourse before age 14 and 60% of those who had sex before age 15 report having had a forced sexual experience". Because of difficulties in bringing such cases to trial, however, "data from the period 1975–1978 ... indicate that, on average, only 413 men were arrested annually for statutory rape in California, even though 50,000 pregnancies occurred among underage women in 1976 alone".^[41] In that state, it was found that two thirds of babies born to school-age mothers were fathered by adult men.^[39]

Sexual abuse early in life can lead young women to feel a lack of control over their sexual lives, decrease their future likelihood of using contraceptives such as condoms, and increase their chances of becoming pregnant or acquiring sexually transmitted infections.^[30] A 2007 paper by Child Trends^[42] examined studies from 2000 to 2006 to identify links between sexual abuse and teenage pregnancy, starting with Blinn-Pike et al.'s 2002 metastudy of 15 studies since 1989.^[43] It found that childhood sexual abuse has a "significant association" with adolescent pregnancy. Direct connections have been demonstrated both by retrospective studies examining antecedents to reported pregnancies and prospective studies, which track the lives of sex abuse victims and "can be helpful for determining causality".^[42]:3 The more severe forms of abuse, such as rape and incest, entail a greater risk of adolescent pregnancy.^{[42]:4[44],[45]} Although some researchers suggest that pregnancy could be a choice made to escape a "bad situation", it may also be "a direct result of unwanted intercourse", which one study found to be the case for about 13% of participants in a Texas parenting program.^[42]:4[46]

In Nicaragua, between 2000 and 2010, around 172,500 births were recorded for girls under 14, representing around 13% of the 10.3 million births during that period. These were attributed to poverty, laws forbidding abortion for rape and incest, lack of access to justice, and beliefs held in the culture and legal system.^[5],[47] Many of the youngest documented birth mothers in history experienced precocious puberty and were impregnated as a result of rape, including incest. The youngest, Peruvian Lina Medina, was impregnated when she was four and had a live birth in 1939, at age five.^[48]

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.^[49] Forced pregnancy has been noted in places including Bangladesh, Darfur, and Bosnia.^[50] 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.^[50] 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.^[51] 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.^[52]

Rape during war is recognized under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1820 as a war crime and a crime against humanity.^[53] "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".^[54]

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.^[50] 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.^[55] Children of war rape are also at risk due to neglect by traumatized mothers unable to provide sufficient care.^[55]

In 1937 the Japanese army took over Nanking, which at the time was the capital of China. In the resulting seven-week occupation known as the Rape of Nanking, as many as 80,000 women were raped.^[56] Chinese women and girls of all ages were raped, mutilated, tortured, sexually enslaved, and killed; unknown numbers of them were left pregnant.^[56] Many pregnant Nanking women killed themselves in 1938, and others committed infanticide when their babies were born.^[56] During the rest of the 20th century there was no record of any Chinese woman acknowledging her child as having been born as a result of the Rape of Nanking.^[56]

During the 1992–1995 Bosnian War, pregnancy from rape was used to perpetrate genocide. There were reports of deliberately created "rape camps" intended to impregnate captive Muslim and Croatian women. Women were reported to have been kept in confinement until their pregnancies had advanced beyond a stage at which abortion would be safe.^[57] In the context of a patrilineal society, in which children inherit their father's ethnicity, such camps were intended to create a new generation of Serbian children.^[57] The women's group Tresnjevka claimed that more than 35,000 women and children were held in such Serb-run camps.^{[58][59],[60]} Estimates range from 20,000^[61] to 50,000^[62] victims.^{[63][64],[65]} Feryal Gharahi of Equality Now reported:^[66]

Families were separated, and women and children were kept in the gym, where all of the women and girls over ten years old were raped in the first few days.... There are rape camps all over the country. Thousands of women are being raped and killed. Thousands of women are pregnant as a result of rape. Over and over again, everywhere I went in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Croatian refugee camps, women told me stories of abomination – of being kept in a room, raped repeatedly and told they would be held until they gave birth to Serbian children.

After the Bosnian War, the International Criminal Court updated its statute to prohibit "confin[ing] one or more women forcibly made pregnant, with the intent of affecting the ethnic composition of any population".^[67]

Immediate post-rape protocols call for medical professionals to assess the likelihood that a victim will become pregnant in their assessment of the physical damage done to the woman. Protocol for gaining a history of the use of contraceptives, as a woman's use of birth control pills or other contraceptives before a rape affect her chance of becoming pregnant.^[68] Treatment protocols also call for clinicians to provide access to emergency contraception and counseling on abortion in countries where it is legal.^[69] High-dose estrogen pills were tried as an experimental treatment after rape in the 1960s, and in 1972 Canadian physician A. Albert Yuzpe and his colleagues began systematic studies on the use of ethinylestradiol and norgestrel to provide emergency contraception after an assault. These treatments reduced the rate of pregnancy after rape by 84%.^[70] This method is now called the Yuzpe regimen.^[71] Before being treated with pregnancy prevention measures, a rape victim is given a HCG pregnancy test to determine whether she was already pregnant before the rape.^[72]

When being discharged from emergency care, clinicians provide information about pregnancy as well as other complications such as infection and emotional trauma.^[72] While a woman who has become pregnant during the past 48 hours will test negative for pregnancy in an HCG pregnancy test (unless she was already pregnant before the rape), pregnancy resulting from the rape can be detected at the two-week follow-up visit.^[73]

Decisions of whether to end a rape-related pregnancy or carry it to term, and whether to keep the child or place the child for adoption can be severely traumatizing for a woman.^[74] Abortion rates for pregnancies due to rape vary significantly by culture and demographics; women who live in countries where abortion is illegal must often give birth to the child or secretly undergo a dangerous, unsafe abortion.^[30] Some women do not wish to get abortions for religious or cultural reasons.^[75] In a third of cases, rape-related pregnancies are not discovered until the second trimester of pregnancy, which may reduce a woman's options, particularly if she doesn't have easy access to legal abortion or is still recovering from the trauma of the rape itself.^[6]

In the United States, 1 percent of 1,900 women questioned in 1987 listed rape or incest as the reason for having an abortion; of these, 95 percent named other reasons as well.^[76] A 1996 study of thousands of US women showed that, of pregnancies resulting from rape, 50% were aborted, 12% resulted in miscarriage, and 38% were brought to term and either placed for adoption or raised.^[25] Peer-reviewed studies have reported from 38% of American women to 90% of Peruvian adolescents carrying the pregnancy to term.^[24],[77] In Lima, Peru, where abortion is illegal, 90% of girls aged 12 to 16 who became pregnant through rape carried the child to term.^[77] Of all children born, 1% are placed for adoption; the number of children conceived from rape who are placed for adoption was found to be about 6% in one study and 26% in another.^[78] When a mother commits neonaticide, killing an infant younger than 24 hours old, the child's birth being the result of rape is a main cause, although other psychological and situational factors are generally present.^[79] Some people turn to drugs or alcohol to cope with emotional trauma after a rape; use of these during pregnancy can harm the fetus.^[80]

Modèle:Globalize When a mother chooses to raise her child conceived in rape, the traumatic effect of the rape and the child's blood relationship to the rapist has the potential to create some psychological challenges, but the circumstance of conception is no guarantee to cause psychological problems.^[78],[81] If a woman decides to keep and raise the child, she may have difficulty accepting it, and both mother and child face ostracism in some societies.^[82]

Mothers may also face legal difficulties. In most US states, the rapist maintains parental rights.^[83] Research by legal scholar Shauna Prewitt indicates that the resulting continued contact with the rapist is damaging for women who keep the child.^[83] She wrote in 2012 that in the US, 31 states allow rapists to assert custody and visitation rights over children conceived through rape.^[81]

Pregnancy from rape can also occur when the victim is male and the rapist is female. Many such cases involve the statutory rape of underage boys by adult women who subsequently became pregnant. In Kansas, Hermesmann v. Seyer established that a 13-year-old male victim of rape can be held liable to pay child support for a baby that results from the rape, and later cases in the United States have held likewise.^{[84],[85],[86]}

• (en) Cet article est partiellement ou en totalité issu de l’article de Wikipédia en anglais intitulé « Pregnancy from rape » (voir la liste des auteurs).

• Mouvement pro-choix
• Répercussions du viol (en)
• Grossesse forcée
• Coercition reproductive
• Hypothèses sociobiologiques sur le viol (en)
• Paternité imposée
• Grossesse non désirée
• Viol de guerre

• (en) R. Charli Carpenter, Born of War: Protecting Children of Sexual Violence Survivors in Conflict Zones, Kumarian Press, 25 juin 2007 (ISBN 978-1-56549-237-0, lire en ligne)
• (en) Anne-Marie de Brouwer, Supranational Criminal Prosecution of Sexual Violence: The ICC and the Practice of the ICTY and the ICTR, Intersentia nv, 2005 (ISBN 978-90-5095-533-1, lire en ligne)
• (en) Robert R. Hazelwood et Ann Wolbert Burgess, Practical Aspects of Rape Investigation: A Multidisciplinary Approach, CRC Press, 2009 (ISBN 978-1-4200-6504-6, lire en ligne)
• (en) Jon L. Jenkins et G. Richard Braen, Manual of Emergency Medicine, 5e, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 1^er août 2004 (ISBN 978-0-7817-5035-6, lire en ligne)
• (en) Etienne G. Krug et Organisation mondiale de la santé, World Report on Violence and Health, World Health Organization, 2002 (ISBN 978-92-4-154561-7, lire en ligne)
  • Organisation mondiale de la santé, « Rapport mondial sur la violence et la santé », sur www.who.int, 3 octobre 2002
• (en) Sally Price, Mental Health in Pregnancy and Childbirth, Elsevier Health Sciences, 2007 (ISBN 978-0-443-10317-9, lire en ligne)
• (en) Merril D. Smith, Encyclopedia of Rape, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004 (ISBN 978-0-313-32687-5, lire en ligne)

• (en) DK Beebe, « Emergency management of the adult female rape victim », dans American Family Physician, vol. 43, 1991, 2041–6 p. (PMID 2042547)
• (en) R Campbell et D Bybee, « Emergency medical services for rape victims: Detecting the cracks in service delivery », dans Women's Health, vol. 3, 1997, 75–101 p. (PMID 9332152)
• (en) Mary M. Krueger, « Pregnancy as a result of rape », dans Journal of Sex Education & Therapy, vol. 14, 1988, 23–7 p. (DOI 10.1080/01614576.1988.11074920)
• (en) Anthony Lathrop, « Pregnancy Resulting from Rape », dans Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, & Neonatal Nursing, vol. 27, 1998, 25–31 p. (PMID 9475124, DOI 10.1111/j.1552-6909.1998.tb02587.x)
• (en) J. McFarlane, « Pregnancy Following Partner Rape: What We Know and What We Need to Know », dans Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, vol. 8, 2007, 127–34 p. (PMID 17545570, DOI 10.1177/1524838007301222, S2CID 732231)
• (en) Sandra Sutherland et Donald J. Scherl, « Patterns of Response Among Victims of Rape », dans American Journal of Orthopsychiatry (en), vol. 40, 2010, 503–11 p. (PMID 5422298, DOI 10.1111/j.1939-0025.1970.tb00708.x)

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[[Catégorie:Grossesse]] [[Catégorie:Viol]] [[Catégorie:Violences sexuelles]] [[Catégorie:Violence contre les femmes]]