Forced pregnancy

Forced pregnancy is the practice of forcing a woman to become pregnant, often with the goal of forcing her into marriage, or forcing her to give birth as part of a programme of breeding slaves, or as part of a programme of genocide.

Bride kidnapping
The practices of bride kidnapping and forced marriage typically (with the exception of purely symbolic "bride kidnappings" which are actually consensual elopements) involve the rape of the "bride" with the intention of forcing her to become pregnant, and thus in a position where she becomes dependent on her rapist and her family and, because of cultural attitudes to rape, unable to return to her own family.

Slave breeding in the United States
During the period of slavery in the United States, many slave owners attempted to influence the reproduction of slaves in order to increase the wealth of slaveholders.

Slave breeding included coerced sexual relations between male and female slaves, promoting pregnancies of slaves, sexual relations between master and slave with the aim of producing slave children, and favoring female slaves who produced a relatively large number of children.

The purpose of slave breeding was to produce new slaves without incurring the cost of purchase, to fill labor shortages caused by the termination of the Atlantic slave trade, and to attempt to improve the health and productivity of slaves. Slave breeding was condoned in the South because slaves were considered to be subhuman chattels, and were not entitled to the same rights accorded to free persons.

Forced pregnancy as a means of genocide
Rape, sexual slavery, and related actions including forced pregnancy and sexual slavery, are now recognized under the Geneva Convention as crimes against humanity and war crimes; in particular from 1949, Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and later also the 1977 Additional Protocols to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, explicitly prohibit wartime rape and enforced prostitution. The Rome Statute Explanatory Memorandum, which defines the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, recognises rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, and forced pregnancy among others, as crime against humanity if part of a widespread or systematic practice.

Rwanda
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda identified rape as capable of amounting to genocide when used systematically or on a mass scale to destroy a people; later the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia also recognized rape as capable of being a crime against humanity. In 2008 the U.N. Security Council's resolution 1820 identified such acts as capable of being "war crimes, crimes against humanity or ... genocide”. Despite these measures, rape, whether systematic or otherwise, remains widespread in conflict zones.

Bosnian war
During the 1992 - 1995 Bosnian war, the existence of deliberately created "rape camps" was reported. The reported aim of these camps was to impregnate Muslim and Croatian women held captive. Women were reported to often be kept in confinement until the late stage of their pregnancy. This occurred in the context of a patrilineal society, in which children inherit their father's ethnicity, hence the "rape camps" aimed at the birth of a new generation of Serb children. According to the Women's Group Tresnjevka more than 35,000 women and children were held in such Serb-run "rape camps". Estimates range from 20,000 to 50,000 victims. Numerous Serbian officers, soldiers and others were convicted of rape as a war crime by the International Criminal Tribunal and the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the events inspired the Golden Bear winner at the 56th Berlin International Film Festival in 2006, called Grbavica.


 * "[W]omen 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."
 * - 1993 report by lawyer and Equality Now board member Feryal Gharahi, into the Bosnian war.