This is fresh air, I'm Terry Gross. It's only been a few months since Row was struck down

ending a woman's constitutional right to an abortion, leaving it up to the states to decide

on the legality of abortion and restrictions surrounding it. But the battle over abortion rights

continues in state legislatures, state supreme courts, and Congress. Anti-abortion activists are

pushing for further restrictions with the goal of totally outlawing abortion. Abortion rights

activists are trying to find ways to maintain access to abortion. New developments in medical

procedures, including medication abortions through pills, have led to new arguments and strategies

on each side. Here to talk about the latest developments, what the future may hold, and how we got here,

is Mary Ziegler, who has written several books about the law, politics, culture, and history,

surrounding the abortion debate. She's the Martin Luther King Jr. professor at the University of

California Davis School of Law. Her new book is called Row, the History of a National Obsession.

It's about how the abortion debate relates to the way we talk about and legally define

liberty, equality, civil rights, women's rights, LGBTQ rights, freedom of religion, body autonomy,

and medical care and how we pay for it. Mary Ziegler, welcome back to fresh air.

Thanks for having me. So the battleground has shifted to the states, and that's making abortion

rights and punishments really difficult to follow because there's so many variations from state to

state. So can we start with a brief overview of how many states have totally outlawed abortion

with no exception and some that have excluded the exceptions of danger to the mother's life or rape

or incest? Yeah, so they're about half the states that have a pretty sweeping abortion ban in

place, and of those about 13 have bans that are actually enforced. At the moment, all of those

bans, at least in theory, have some sort of exception. There's a handful, for example, like Iowa's,

that only make exceptions for life of the mother or pregnant person. Others have very narrow health

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