The Supreme Court’s June 24 decision overruling Roe v. Wade unleashed an immediate and relentless flood of cruelty against pregnant Americans. Child victims of rape and incest, including a 10-year-old girl in Ohio, must cross state lines to obtain abortions. Patients undergoing a miscarriage are compelled to bleed out for days and risk sepsis before doctors are willing to terminate their pregnancies. Those with ectopic pregnancies, which are lethal and non-viable, are denied treatment due to the presence of a fetal “heartbeat.” Women suspected of being pregnant are denied vital treatment for autoimmune disorders because they happen to induce abortion, too.

In the face of these horror stories, the anti-abortion movement has doubled down. Jim Bopp, general counsel for the National Right to Life, said that the 10-year-old girl rape victim Ohio should have been forced to carry her rapist’s fetus, telling Politico: “She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child.” Other anti-abortion groups condemned the girl’s abortion as “violence perpetuated against her.” And John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, acknowledged that abortion bans may cause doctors to delay care for miscarriage patients until complications arise.

These organizations are defending a legal regime that they helped to craft. Most post-Roe abortion bans contain no exception for rape or incest, and only an extremely vague, narrow exception to protect the life of the mother. These laws are crafted to outlaw abortion in all but the most dire circumstances, when the patient is actively dying because of pregnancy—and even then, the bans are so ambiguous that doctors fear liability if they terminate.

STERN: My sense is that many anti-abortion advocates believe it is worth risking the death of the patient by providing extremely narrow health exemptions in order to spare a maximum number of fetuses from termination. Do you think that’s fair?

ZIEGLER: I think that’s fair. There has been a growing push to get rid of life-saving exceptions. In the worldview most folks in the anti-abortion movement have, abortion is murder. It’s worse not only in the sense that it’s certain death, but that it’s intentional. From their standpoint, if some women die because they’re refused care, that isn’t a certain death, there isn’t intentionally going to be a death, so that’s the lesser of the evils in that situation.