Quelling Violence In Terror States! The Return Of Dickman

Here is the opening sentence in the Abstract of a paper in the NEJM, as hilariously false as you are like to see these days: “Violence against women receives little attention from policymakers and courts.”

The peer-reviewed paper has the hersterical (there is no misspelling) “Rape, Homicide, and Abortion Bans — The Abandonment of People Subjected to Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence” by Elizabeth Tobin-Tyler, a lawyer, and the wonderfully named Samuel L. Dickman, a physician.

Abandonment!

We have met the Dickman before (blog, Substack). He was crying “Rape!” then, too. He claimed that, somehow, rapes and rape-induced pregnancies rose after the Supreme Court left the decision on whether women could kill their men’s children to state courts. He didn’t know what he was doing with numbers then (he said there was a 12.4% chance of getting pregnant from a “rape”, the word in scare quotes because he included any number of things that aren’t rape as “rape”). Has he since learned?

No.

He’s still touting the ridiculous one-in-four number: “One in four women in the United States is raped during her lifetime.” That’s from CDC material (you may remember those Experts from the covid panic) in which they include a lot of things that are not rape as “rape”, including attempts (a word ripe for juicing) and intercourse when the woman was “too drunk, high, drugged, or passed out”. Attempts and anal penetration (nasty, and also on the list) are curious because of the Dickman’s cry that such large numbers of women become pregnant in these “rapes”.

Well, some “doctors” are saying some men are women, and vice versa, so why not claim a drunk woman can get pregnant when a man merely makes unwanted eyes at her (which is attempted rape, after all)? They later sniff at other definitions of rape: “The definition of rape used in a major national survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics — the National Crime Victimization Survey — is narrower than common understandings of rape and many legal definitions.”

Anyway, here’s the opening of the peer-reviewed paper:

Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, some of the many underappreciated consequences for women’s health involve violence and pregnancy. Despite high-profile efforts by advocates to hold perpetrators accountable for sexual harassment and assault in the #MeToo era, violence against women continues to be largely ignored and normalized by policymakers and the public. 

Yeah, sure, dude. Women are completely silent on this mysterious phenomenon. Even more curious is why the Dickman thinks things like this are science:

Pregnancy and violence are bidirectionally connected. People who have been subjected to IPV [intimate-partner violence] or sexual violence often experience reproductive coercion, in which an abusive partner refuses to use or sabotages birth control or blocks access to abortion. 

Getting married is giving consent to both sexual intercourse and its (occasional) natural result.

The whole thing is one big whine, making it difficult to understand what point they are making, except that they hate, really hate, restrictions on women killing off their offspring. They really reach, too, saying things like guns are bad (except, one presumes, for Regime enforcers): “The combination of high rates of IPV and broad access to firearms in the United States puts women at particular risk for violent death. Black women are at greatest risk for homicide during the peripartum period.” Are they indeed.

There are some statistics in the paper, though they are all just as risible as that “one-in-four.” For instance, they have a table of terror states with “total” abortion bans. They use this to push the idea that about one third to almost half of all women in these terror states experience intimate-partner “violence.” What’s that?

They have a small footnote saying the IP “violence” numbers are from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. But they don’t say where, what, how, or anything else about these numbers. How did they get away with that in a peer-reviewed article?

I look up the NCADV and they have a ladies-magazine style quiz to see if you have been “abused.” Most of this is like “Does your partner…Make you feel like you are unable to make decisions?” Abuse!

I looked up their stats. They say the worse IPV-state is California, which is not on the of terror states that have abortion restrictions. Ladies, get out of California. In fact, all but one (Texas) of the top ten states for violence are not on the Dickman’s list of terror states. In the top ten cities there is Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Phoenix, San Diego, Atlanta, all in states that aren’t in the Dickman’s terror state list.

Here’s what’s hilarious: the correlation goes the other way: states with open total abortions are more likely to have reported violence than states with restrictions.

But it’s all great nonsense.

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