#abortion exceptions

Kylie Cheung at Abortion, Every Day:

Throughout my years writing about reproductive justice, survivor justice, and the inextricability of these movements and experiences, I’ve encountered a similar pattern: Just as we’re told, implicitly and explicitly, there are “good” victims and “bad” victims, we’re similarly told there are “good” abortions and “bad” abortions. Despite these innately sexist, surface-level distinctions, under patriarchy, rape culture, and abortion bans, all survivors and all abortion seekers are dehumanized and denied agency—by abusive men, and certainly, by the state governments that are imposing forced pregnancy. In some narrow cases, their laws claim to offer exceptions to rape victims, deeming these abortions “good.”

In my new book Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Bans, which releases with Pluto Press on July 20, one section addresses the mythology of rape exceptions, the anti-abortion movement’s attempts to distinguish “good” abortions from “bad,” and why these exceptions don’t work. I argue that anti-abortion leaders know these exceptions don’t work—they simply want the good PR of pretending to care about victims, while, in reality, ensuring that no one can actually get care, because doctors are too afraid of prison time to provide it. There are so many incredible books about abortion out there—including Jessica’s, which came out last year! For the last decade, I’ve written and reported extensively on the intersections between gender-based violence and reproductive justice, and how gender-based violence comprises not just interpersonal acts of abuse, but also state violence and policies. With Coercion, I wanted to dedicate a book specifically to unpacking, at the most granular level, how abortion bans and the so-called “abortion debate” are not just abstract policy positions that we can comfortably agree to disagree on with anti-abortion leaders; rather, all of this amounts to political violence. Abortion and abortion legislation are a matter of life—agency over one’s life, the ability to live a dignified life—and death, with material consequences for pregnant people, for victims of domestic violence, for those most marginalized under white supremacy and capitalism.

The endless, supposedly “unintentional” consequences of abortion bans—rising maternal mortality, child victims forced to travel out of state, increasing risk of pregnancy criminalization, pregnant victims coerced by their abusers—really reflect the intended purposes of abortion bans: to police and control pregnant people and their reproduction, to feed cycles of interpersonal gender-based violence as a tool in the toolbox of abusers, to inflict economic subjugation and racial violence, and to actively kill pregnant people—by denying or delaying their access to life-saving abortion care, or by entrapping them with their abusers in a country where homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant people. In one chapter of the book, partially excerpted below, I write about how rape exceptions attached to abortion bans are meant to sanitize the cruelty and violence of these laws, and debunk this framing. Since I started working at Abortion, Every Day in June, I’ve been inspired by the passion and dedication of this community, and your eagerness to engage difficult conversations, to relentlessly champion women and pregnant people’s rights. I hope my book can play even a small part in guiding those conversations, and am excited to share this small portion of it with you.

The Mythology of Rape Exceptions

Shortly after Election Day in 2024, Donald Trump unsuccessfully attempted to appoint former Congressman Matt Gaetz to run the Justice Department—an agency that could potentially establish a federal abortion ban by wielding the Comstock Act of 1873, a law that could prohibit the mailing of abortion pills or abortion-related medical supplies as “obscene materials.” But Gaetz’s nomination was thrown into chaos by allegations that he’d sex trafficked a minor. Elon Musk, Trump’s billionaire adviser who has sexual misconduct allegations himself, said the allegations against Gaetz were “worth less than nothing . . . a man is considered innocent until proven guilty.” Ironically, Musk made this argument despite continuing to support Trump, who a jury found civilly liable for sexual abuse in 2023. As always, “innocent until proven guilty” is just a slogan to men like Musk because there’s no proof of guilt they’ll really accept. Time and again, when victims come forward, whether they have only their testimony or an arsenal of evidence, they’re discredited, turned away, even punished—because gender-based violence is normative in our society, because beneath surface-level condemnation, our society does not regard gender-based violence as morally wrong.

[...] Rape exceptions largely hinge on respectability politics. They separate “good” abortions from “bad,” frivolous abortions, and exist to give abortion laws a veneer of compassion while purposefully failing to help victims in practice. Many state abortion bans are criticized for lacking rape exceptions. But laws that include such exceptions carry all the same implicit violence. As the available data in Mississippi suggests, few rape victims seeking abortion care successfully access or even know how to seek out the exception. Many abortion restrictions, even from before Dobbs, have required victims to report their rape to the police or receive medical clearance for the exception, all within health and legal systems that have proven hostile to them. In 2023, one Tennessee bill nearly added a rape exception to the state’s total abortion ban that would threaten those who “lied” about being raped to access care with three years in prison. This addendum was ultimately struck, not because it was both absurd and violent, but because Tennessee lawmakers killed the bill to prevent the addition of a rape exception altogether. The following year, Missouri Republicans blocked a bill to add a rape exception to their own abortion ban. One explained his vote by arguing that being forced to carry their rapist’s baby could be “healing” for victims; another inexplicably argued that under the exception, “a one-year-old could get an abortion.” In May 2024, Louisiana Republicans blocked a rape exception, too. One argued teenagers would simply lie about being raped—all while an OB-GYN testified before the legislature that she and her colleagues have had to deliver babies to teens as young as 13. And in January 2025, an Indiana lawmaker introduced a bill that, in addition to criminalizing possession of abortion pills, required rape victims to submit legal affidavits to access abortion, threatening them with perjury for supposed false reports.3 At the same time as the Indiana bill, a New Hampshire Republican introduced a 15-week abortion ban and said the bill would require that rape be reported within a short period to access an exception, so the exception couldn’t be used as a “convenient excuse.”

In effect, rape exceptions are “entirely disingenuous,” Destini Spaeth, an organizer at the North Dakota-based Prairie Abortion Fund (formerly the Women In Need abortion fund), told me in 2023, referencing the Tennessee bill. They’re merely “PR for anti-abortion politicians” while serving as a “deterrent” to survivors. Spaeth’s group is dedicated to serving survivors’ reproductive care needs. “[Rape exceptions are] just another round of violation of their autonomy within the health care system, within a police and judicial system that routinely hurts survivors.” Tennessee’s bill was built on existing, systemic barriers: Sexual assault survivors are often threatened with criminalization, sometimes upon reporting their assailant, and face jarringly high rates of incarceration. And criminal charges for pregnancy outcomes—including abortion—often implicate victims of violence: As previously mentioned in 2019, Alabama resident Marshae Jones was jailed for fetal homicide when she miscarried after she was shot. Exceptions, survivor and reproductive justice activist Alison Turkos told me in 2022, have allowed “survivors’ trauma to be reduced to currency, and measured with a yardstick to see if you can get an abortion.”

  This is important information from the Life is Beautiful Platform at the United Nations. We are actively engaged in shaping the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals and this information needs to be shared!