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32,000 pregnancies as a result of rape per year do not constitute...”rare”.

Even if that's the actual number (and it is actually an estimate from a single study; I'll post some of the abstract from it below), that is still only 1 out of every 187 pregnancies (32,000/6,000,000 annual pregnancies in the US per year = 0.53%, or 1/187). That seems pretty rare to me.

Now, the abstract excerpt: RESULTS: The national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year. Among 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy, the majority occurred among adolescents and resulted from assault by a known, often related perpetrator. Only 11.7% of these victims received immediate medical attention after the assault, and 47.1% received no medical attention related to the rape. A total 32.4% of these victims did not discover they were pregnant until they had already entered the second trimester; 32.2% opted to keep the infant whereas 50% underwent abortion and 5.9% placed the infant for adoption; an additional 11.8% had spontaneous abortion. .

This study suffers from a number of flaws. It is based on telephonic surveys, not medical or police records. The n of 34 is an extremely small sample size on which to be basing any kind of conclusions. The description that most of the victims were adolescents who knew their attackers suggests to me that many of them were involved in statutory rape (in which case it may have been consensual, but was rape under legal definition) or incestuous (which could explain the unusually high abortion rate of this group as compared to rape victims overall; abortion is often used to hide incest from outsiders, allowing the abuse to continue). There are other flaws in this study which I won't bother to go into; the bottom line is that I wouldn't use the "32,000" figure without having a more solid factual basis for it than that study. (And yes, that one flawed study is the only source for that number.)

And to get to the “legitimate rape” comment. I believe he meant “actual rape as opposed to claimed rape”.

For me, rape is when sex is forced on a woman. And I don’t include statutory rape. But that’s just me.

And the background point I was hearing in his remarks was that when you allow abortion in cases of rape, the rate of “unsolved rape” would skyrocket for obvious reasons.

If there is no police report, there is no rape. Period.