However, the group supports exemptions for life-saving abortion. “That’s not an act of abortion,” she said, “since the intent of abortion is to end life, not to intervene to save lives if possible.”
But some groups, such as Pro-Life Wisconsin and those affiliated with the abortion abolition movement, reject all exceptions, as does Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, who calls abortion “science-denying genocide.”
Some abortion rights advocates argue that focusing on exceptions is a misguided idea. When people are shocked that the new laws don’t allow exceptions for rape and incest, “they seem to suggest that if those exceptions are allowed, the new restrictive laws would be more reasonable,” said Leslie J. Reagan, a historian of American medicine. and public health at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Whether there are exceptions or not, some state bans include criminal penalties, which Dr. Reagan, author of “When Abortion Was a Crime,” called it “a step back to the century of criminalized abortion the US has already lived through.”
The history of exceptions goes back decades. In 1959, the American Law Institute, an independent group of lawyers, attorneys, and judges, began drafting model legislation to change the crime of abortion. It suggested allowing termination if a doctor judged there was a serious risk to the health of the woman or fetus, or if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest.
Two threats to a fetus were of great concern at the time. One was the morning sickness drug thalidomide, which was tested on American women in the 1950s and could cause serious birth defects or stillbirths. Another was rubella, commonly known as German measles, which could cause stillbirth or life-threatening effects on the baby (a vaccine was approved in 1969).
Over the next 14 years, at least 13 states would adopt some of those exceptions. Ms. Ziegler said opponents of abortion saw the exceptions as a compromise and acknowledged that these were “hard cases, a struggle that wasn’t worth it because the country wasn’t there yet.”
