During this same period, leaders of the anti-abortion movement have developed deep suspicion of elite medical organizations like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and even the CDC. The more that anti-abortion-rights Americans distrust mainstream science, the easier it is for them to believe that there is no need for a woman to have an abortion to save her life, ever. This belief is in some ways dependent on semantics. Pro-life doctors distinguish “direct abortions,” where doctors intend to end a pregnancy, from morally permissible procedures where the termination of pregnancy is the secondary effect of another emergency medical procedure. This distinction lines up with Catholic religious teachings: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops instructs that abortion, defined as the “directly intended termination of a pregnancy, is never permitted,” but allows for “procedures that have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman.”

This intent-based definition of abortion has spread throughout the anti-abortion-rights movement, and fits into an ascendant anti-abortion-rights model framing abortion as a crime, like homicide, defined by the perpetrator’s state of mind. AAPLOG, the movement’s leading medical organization, argues that “direct abortion is not medically necessary to save the life of a woman.” The organization suggests that doctors may separate “a mother and her unborn child for the purposes of saving a mother’s life,” but not with the intention of taking a fetal life. And even doctors with the right intentions must make “every reasonable attempt to save the baby’s life.”