Rape-Related Pregnancy and Reproductive Coercion

One of the featured articles in this month’s Articles of Note will be from the current issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Rape-Related Pregnancy and Association With Reproductive Coercion in the U.S. (PDF). It’s currently available free online, so I wanted to take this opportunity to point you in its direction.  I’m highlighting it here because it looks not just at pregnancy following sexual assault, but pregnancy from different types of sexual violence, including reproductive coercion.

This is not a topic we see widely covered in the literature and it emphasizes the importance of screening for broadly defined sexual violence (to include reproductive coercion, such as birth control sabotage) in our intimate partner violence patient population. But it also makes clear the importance of emergency contraception availability to patients outside the traditional acute sexual assault population. We haven’t typically discussed EC inclusion more widely, and while we mention it in IAFN’s IPV Education Guidelines, it’s under Dynamics of IPV and not under Nursing Management. 

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