Jessica Valenti: Abortion Exceptions Don't Exist

[Nevilledog]

https://jessica.substack.com/p/abortion-exceptions-dont-exist

As 2024 approaches, Republicans are struggling with how to defend abortion bans to the American people. Polls continue to show that the laws are deeply unpopular, and support for abortion rights is at the highest it’s ever been in the country’s history. It’s not so easy to talk up legislation that the vast majority of voters oppose—but conservative lawmakers and strategists think they may have the answer: Exceptions.

The only thing that Americans want more than broad access to abortion is access to abortion for sexual violence victims and those whose health and lives are in danger. The polling is downright astronomical—even in red states, even among Republicans. And so it makes sense that conservatives would focus on exceptions; they desperately need an abortion stance that’s popular.

Best of all for the GOP, exceptions aren’t real. They’re deliberately designed to be unusable. So when Republicans announce their support for so-called exceptions—loudly proclaiming that they’re willing to meet in the middle—they’re presenting a compromise that doesn’t actually exist. For them, it’s a win-win.

Inexplicably, Democrats have spent little time pointing out that exceptions aren’t real—even though they have all the proof they need.

Since Roe was overturned, horror story after horror story has come out of states with ‘exceptions’ to their bans. A woman in Texas going septic, a Missouri woman with a doomed and deadly pregnancy, a 10 year-old rape victim in Ohio. All lived in states where their circumstances should have qualified them for abortions, yet none were able to access care. One woman in Louisiana even had a fetus with a fatal condition that was specifically listed in the state’s exceptions, yet had to leave her home state for an abortion.

*snip*

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. Exceptions don't exist? That is bullshit. Pure and simple BS.

We Democrats need to make the case that exceptions do exist, and that ignoring them is catastrophic for the people who experience them.

[Nevilledog]

3. Peggy.... The RW is lying about exceptions existing.

We need to focus on women having bodily autonomy, not compromising to satisfy the never satisfied. Roe v. Wade WAS the compromise.

[Ocelot II]

4. Of course they *should* exist, but the GOP is trying to make their bills more palatable

by claiming that they contain exceptions - but the problem is that these "exceptions" have so many built-in hurdles and roadblocks that effectively they don't exist at all because the requirements to fit into an exception are almost always unattainable.

[NowISeetheLight]

6. Palatable

Here's your pile of GOP Sxxt.... Oh and here's a bottle of Ketchup.

[Ocelot II]

7. Well, that's what *they* seem to think.

"See, we aren't fanatics; we aren't trying to ban all abortions!" Though effectively that's exactly what they're trying to do by making even their narrow exceptions illusory in real application.

[gratuitous]

11. Also, the good faith judgment of a medical provider is subject to after-the-fact second guessing

A doctor thinks this abortion fits under one of the exceptions, but then has to risk his or her license, practice, and livelihood - maybe even freedom - when that decision is reviewed by the most zealous anti-women ideologues. They're not above lying to support their point, and if all else fails to register with an adjudicatory body, they'll fall back on some nonsense like, "Well, maybe God would have performed a miracle and that anencephalic fetus's head would have magically grown in during delivery, but Dr. Killdead got in God's way by aborting that precious baby!"

Yes, absolutely ludicrous. But then the medical professionals are reduced to arguing that never in the history of medicine has something like that occurred, giving it a weight and semblance of reality that doesn't exist. What doctors are going to put their lives on the line for that decision?

[WhiskeyGrinder]

10. The point is exceptions don't exist if they're not granted, and they're not granted.

Fighting just for exceptions grants way too much ground and is fighting over crumbs. There shouldn't be exceptions *at all,* because the standard should be people can get an abortion when they want one.

[Ocelot II]

12. Bingo.

[Johnny2X2X]

2. If given the power to

Republicans will ban 100% of abortions, even in case of the life of the mother. That's always been their real position on this because the thing they want more thqan anything is for sex to be a punishment that could include death.

[intheflow]

8. *Women* should be punished for sex.

Men don't have to give two thoughts to a pregnancy.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

14. a man wrote a letter to the editor recently, telling women that the fetus comes first.

basically...sucks if you might die, once you become pregnant, woman is in incubator ...basically what anti choicers think

[NowISeetheLight]

5. Wisconsin Case - Horrific

Another one was the Wisconsin case. A lady was left bleeding for ten days from an incomplete miscarriage. She was turned away from the hospital because doctors were afraid to treat her. She needed remaining fetal tissue removed and they were afraid to do it. Wisconsin has an 1849 near total ban on abortion law they're following. Insane.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.yahoo.com/amphtml/woman-left-bleed-10-days-184515591.html

[Mad_Machine76]

9. Hospitals seem so lawsuit (and criminal charge) shy

that, even if there are "exceptions," their legal departments seem to be advising them conservatively and against intervention unless a woman is on death's door, so the exceptions are virtually nonexistent in practice.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

13. kick