Whatever Happened to the Exceptions for Rape and Incest?
New abortion bans are stricter than ever before.
Amid all the attention paid to the legal drama surrounding both Mississippi’s and Texas’s contested abortion laws, one striking detail seems to have escaped much notice: Neither state makes an exception for rape or incest.
This is a major departure, a sign of how extreme America’s abortion politics have become. For decades, exceptions to abortion bans for rape and incest were a rare source of consensus.
And they still are, among the public: Time and again, Gallup has found that nearly 80 percent of Americans support such exceptions. This is true even in red states such as Alabama and Texas. Yet these exceptions are now vanishing.
[Chavi Eve Karkowsky: Another extremist law that Americans have to live with]
The reason is
