Postscript: Abortion Extremism and Criminalization: Whatever Happened to Exceptions for Rape and Incest?

This Postscript engages two of the country’s most celebrated legal scholars to discuss the criminalization of abortion and miscarriage, the elimination of exceptions for rape and incest, the political and legal repercussions of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Texas SB-8, and yesterday’s news from the FDA making medication abortions more accessible to some women in the United States.

Michele Goodwin is a chancellors’ Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine Law School. She recently authored Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood (Cambridge University Press 2020) and you can hear her interview with New Books in Law. Her widely New York Times essay, “I was Raped by My Father and an Abortion Saved My Life,” interrogates the impact of abortion on girls who are raped by family members. The episode of her podcast with Renee Bracey Sherman mentioned in the conversation is On the Issues with Michele Goodwin, “Supreme Court Rundown: Will Roe Survive?.

Mary Ziegler is the Stearns Weaver Miller Professor at Florida State University College of Law and visiting professor at Harvard Law School Spring 2022. Her most recent book is Abortion and the Law in America: A Legal History, Roe v. Wade to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Dollars for Life: The Antiabortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2022. Dr. Ziegler’s public facing scholarship includes her recent piece in The Atlantic exploring the constitutional chaos that may be created as other states deploy Texas’s anti-abortion bounty system.

Their coauthored “Whatever Happened to the Exceptions for Rape and Incest” in The Atlantic is mentioned in the podcast – as well as forthcoming scholarship on medication abortion by Allison Whelan, Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School is also mentioned.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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