The lack of a rape or incest exemption is the culmination of a narrative that values the
First-person essays and interviews with unique perspectives on complicated issues.
The anti-abortion statute signed by the governor of Alabama this week is shocking partly because it aims to outlaw all abortions, including those for unwanted pregnancies that are the result of rape and incest. The Alabama law (and other similar laws in Missouri, Ohio, Kentucky, and Georgia, with more on the way) is even more broadly shocking because Roe v. Wade has been the law of the land for nearly a half-century, supporting women’s efforts to achieve the status of full citizenship. The new Alabama law endorses the end of this project.
Some members of the Alabama legislature have admitted that the criminalization of abortions as a response to rape and incest amounts to a grandstand play, a tactic to hasten judicial review and the demise of Roe. This may or may not prove to be a sound strategy. It is definitely an innovation, if a logical culmination of decades of an anti-abortion position that degrades pregnant individuals in the interests of the “unborn child” or the “fetal person.”
Before Roe, rape and incest were usually not mentioned in the 19th century laws criminalizing abortion. The American Medical Association did not consider rape a justification for abortion primarily because they believed women who claimed rape might be lying. In 1904, after state anti-abortion laws were on the books everywhere, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association reminded a doctor that women rarely become pregnant because of a real rape. He added, “The enormity of the crime of rape does not justify murder.”
Nevertheless, whatever any given anti-abortion law said, many doctors agreed that a pregnant victim of rape or incest should be spared the horror of coerced pregnancy and motherhood in these cases. In the late 1950s, the obstetrical staff at more than two dozen California hospitals were polled regarding the hypothetical case of “Miss C.
