The Elizabeth Smart Effect

 Elizabeth Smart is an amazing woman. Abducted at age 14 through her bedroom window one night by a drifter whom her father had hired for some odd jobs, she spent the next nine months being raped several times a day. When she was finally found by investigators hidden in plain sight on the streets of Sandy, Utah, she had been so utterly brainwashed that, thinking her family would never take her back, she initially refused to even admit who she was.
But from that low point, she made an amazing comeback. After making up the year of school she'd missed, she went on to graduate from BYU and flew back from a Mission in France to testify at her abuser's trial for kidnapping and rape. Then, incredibly, she became a journalist for NBC, interviewing women like her who had been kidnapped by sexual abusers. Unlike abuse victims who desire anonymity, she has never been afraid to tell her story and in fact used it to catapult her to national attention, using that platform to advocate against sexual assault.
In honor of Elizabeth and her willingness to share every facet of her horrifying experience, I'm naming a little-understood phenomenon after her: The Elizabeth Smart Effect. Simply put, this is the tendency of traumatic rape victims not to have functioning reproductive systems during the time they are under the control of their abusers. Despite the daily rapes, Elizabeth never fell pregnant until after she had married her legal husband. How could this be?

Some may offer the obvious answer that her abuser wasn't fertile himself, and was thus unable to impregnate her. But what about numerous other victims who demonstrate the same effect? In The Slave Across the Street, Theresa Flores relates her experience of serving as a teenage concubine to an entire underworld crime network for over a year--without ever falling pregnant. And the anecdotes are countless; despite pregnancy resulting from single rapes that happened to coincide with a woman already being fertile, rapes that are part of an ongoing abusive situation really do sometimes seem to shut down a woman's reproductive system, so that she never does go through a fertile cycle until the abuse ends.

More study on this is definitely needed--but will it ever come? The political establishment, particularly the pro-abortion wing, clings desperately to the idea that women who are raped NEED the option of snuffing out of any life that results from that rape, and anyone referencing the Elizabeth Smart Effect is likely to get shouted down--or, in the famous case of Todd Akin, even voted out of office just for mentioning it. If there is a biological phenomenon behind the Elizabeth Smart Effect, isolating it, describing it, and publishing it will face some formidable political hurdles.