Exceptions to abortion bans are a fraud
By 
As Michelle Goldberg observes, opponents of legal abortion in the United States believe in total control over a woman’s reproductive autonomy, and the exceptions they reluctantly agree to for rube-running purposes are never intended to be used:
Meanwhile, she’d made multiple trips to the emergency room for severe cramping and what seemed to be leaking amniotic fluid. Her doctor told her that carrying the pregnancy to term could jeopardize her future fertility, and Cox very much wants more children. So she, her husband and her doctor sued the state, seeking a court order to allow her to terminate her pregnancy in Texas. If the Texas abortion ban had workable medical exceptions, it’s hard to see how they wouldn’t apply to Cox. But it doesn’t, and the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, fought the Cox family and their doctor every step of the way.
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As Molly Duane, the Center for Reproductive Rights attorney representing Cox, points out, abortion procedures at 15 weeks of pregnancy or later are generally done over two days, with patients sent home in between. Most people would rather not endure this process in a hotel room. “Truly, she just wanted to get health care in Texas,” Duane said on Friday. But she couldn’t. Late on Monday, the Texas Supreme Court declared that Cox wasn’t entitled to an abortion and vacated the lower court’s order.
“I think it’s the clearest message you could have possibly received from an anti-abortion state that they never meant the medical exemption to mean anything at all,” said Duane.
An irony here is that if the State Supreme Court had allowed Cox to end her pregnancy in Texas, it might have benefited hard-line abortion opponents. Were the state to codify clear exemptions for people in extreme medical distress, offering a sliver of mercy to women like Zurawski and Cox, its callous abortion ban might seem slightly more politically palatable. That, after all, is why abortion opponents falsely insist that such clarity already exists.
But right-wing politicians and those who support them would rather inflict unimaginable suffering on women than relax the tiniest bit of control over their medical decisions. I asked Duane if any anti-abortion groups had filed amicus briefs on Cox’s behalf. I wasn’t surprised that the answer was no.
That’s what you call a revealed preference.
Some fake-moderate Republicans will try to sell the idea that 15-week bans are “moderate” because most abortions occur in the first trimester, and some pundits will believe or pretend to believe them. Leaving aside that this is obviously not a stable equilibrium and 15 week bans are just a way station to more draconian bans, most second trimester abortions are cases like Kate Cox’s — high-danger if not life-threatening pregnancies, in many cases with non-viable fetuses. Forcing women like this to carry pregnancies to term is going to horrify most people, and the statutory exceptions that theoretically permit abortions in these cases are generally useless in practice in jurisdictions controlled by opponents of legal abortion.