The end of rape and incest exceptions for abortion make it clear: Forced birthers are not 'pro-life'

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Here’s what happens when you give in rhetorically to the far right’s rhetoric on social issues: you lose. When you say abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” and codify that in laws to create exceptions in bans for rape and incest. Instead of taking the stance that every person who can get pregnant has the right to choose to continue that pregnancy or not within the bounds decided upon by the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. Because when you start making exceptions, when you start conceding that maybe some abortions are justified while some are not, you’re losing ground.

That ground has been gobbled up by the extremists that are now the mainstream of the right and of the U.S. Supreme Court. Because, as Jennifer Haberkorn writes in the LA Times, those “good” abortions—the rape and incest ones—are increasingly being tossed along with the rest. By the Supreme Court.

There is no exception for rape and incest in the Texas abortion ban, the vigilante law that the Supreme Court is allowing to stand while it is challenged in court. The Mississippi law that the court heard in December, and almost certainly will uphold, also includes no ban for rape and incest.

RELATED STORY:  At least 13 states have introduced legislation to limit or ban abortion since the year’s start

“When there are no exceptions for a person who survived rape or incest, it means the state is coercing that person into a pregnancy they don’t want,” Michele Goodwin, a UC Irvine professor who studies law and health and is founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy told the LA Times. Survivors have already been through one harm, “but here’s the state rubber-stamping a second harm.”

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Goodwin is a survivor of incest and of an abortion at 12. Her father impregnated her, then lied about her age to get a legal abortion for her. Seeing that option being shut off for other children is worrying, to say the least. “I tried to put myself in the deepest corners of closets as a child,” she said. “One of the key steps of being a survivor is to be able to get your freedom back, to be able to get your autonomy back, to be able to get your decision-making back.”

For decades, forced birthers wouldn’t dare go after rape and incest survivors because such huge majorities believe survivors should have access to legal abortion. Back in 2012, when that poll was conducted, there were 13 Republican Senate candidates who agreed with the Republican National Coalition for Life that they were “unconditionally pro-life” and “recognize the inherent right to life of every innocent human being, from conception until natural death, without discrimination.” Two of them are in the Senate now: Ted Cruz (TX), and Deb Fischer (NE). They are among the extremists who helped cram the Supreme Court with forced birther justices.

That’s why a decade later we’re at the point where states feel like outlawing abortion completely, no exceptions, is going to work. “There’s now the opportunity to overturn Roe vs. Wade, overturn abortion rights at the Supreme Court, and that is sort of emboldening these state legislators to move well beyond where a lot of people thought they could go 10 to 15 years ago,” Elizabeth Nash, who tracks state abortion legislation for the Guttmacher Institute, told the LA Times.

That’s extremely convenient for current Senate Republicans, from Leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy to firebrands like Sens. Josh Hawley (MO) and James Lankford (OK) who can say they believe the exceptions should be kept, but have to build a Supreme Court that will allow them to be eliminated in their states.

Even so, it’s not as though having those exceptions has eased the way for survivors seeking abortion care. The states that have tried to outlaw abortion and keep the exceptions don’t make it easy to use them, creating red-tape barriers like requiring police reports or doctor’s signatures. A child who’s been raped by a family member isn’t going to have easy access to officialdom. Plenty of rape survivors have plenty of reasons to refuse to report their assault. While little data on the use of these exemptions exist, Guttmacher studied abortion in assault survivors in 2005, finding “just 1% of patients getting an abortion did so because of rape and less than 0.5% did so because of incest.”

“There are so many practical reasons that a rape exemption doesn’t pan out for survivors, and so it serves to feel like a salve on abortion restrictions,” said Juliana Gonzales, senior director of sexual assault services at the SAFE Alliance, an Austin, Texas-based nonprofit. “On a practical level, the exceptions don’t do anything. That’s the honest truth.”

What they have served as is a way for the extremists to pretend that they are compassionate toward survivors, to pretend that they care about the person carrying a fetus. They’re even increasingly giving up that façade. Google “life of the mother exceptions” and you’ll find link after link from the forced birther groups and their allies attesting to the fact that they don’t care, rejecting the idea that a fully realized person’s life is equal to that of a fetus, much less more important.

There are still some lower courts and law enforcement officials who recognize that, as of now anyway, there’s a constitutional right to abortion. In Idaho, the state Supreme Court has temporarily blocked its new Texas-style abortion ban which was scheduled to be implemented in a few weeks. And in Texas, District Attorney Gocha Allen Ramirez dismissed an indictment against Lizelle Herrera, who had been arrested for murder for having an abortion.

That’s a dim ray of hope, with a packed Supreme Court poised to do its worst. Which means two things have to happen—we have to elect enough Democrats who will fight like hell to regain all that lost ground and codify abortion protections, and expand the U.S. Supreme Court to get it out of the hands of dangerous ideologues.

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