Across the anti-abortion movement, opposition to these exceptions ran high for years. After Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, a ban on Medicaid funding for abortion, abortion foes fought to eliminate a rape or incest exception, suggesting that women would “cry rape” to get their procedures reimbursed.

This began to change only in the 1980s, when rape and incest exceptions became a third rail. In the previous years, abortion-rights forces had effectively used the lack of a rape and incest exception as a cudgel against the anti-abortion movement. When Republicans in Congress seemed to have the votes to pass a constitutional amendment in 1981 declaring that there was no right to abortion, abortion-rights groups wasted no time in reminding Americans that the move would allow some states to force victims to bear their rapists’ children. They also ridiculed the idea that women could not become pregnant as a result of rape, using it to claim that abortion foes were both anti-science and anti-woman.

Republicans of the era seemed to fall in line behind supporting the exceptions, even if they generally fought to keep them out of the Hyde Amendment. Ronald Reagan, the president who made the Republicans the “party of life,” favored excepting rape and incest when it came to abortion bans (though not abortion funding). So did large majorities of the American public. Indeed, in 1990, the National Right to Life Committee, one of the nation’s largest anti-abortion groups, proposed a law banning most abortions but making an exception for rape and incest.

None of this changed the fact that many abortion opponents were against the exceptions in principle. But publicly condemning the exception just seemed too politically risky.

So why are opponents of abortion defying the political consensus now?

Part of the answer seems to be generational. With a conservative majority now in place on the Supreme Court, some younger abortion foes seem willing to buck the Republican Party’s orthodoxy on issues from climate change to immigration — so why not abortion too?