Galli says she suspects individual women infected with Zika may try petitioning judges to allow abortions. Brazilian judges have on rare occasions granted abortions to women whose fetuses were in danger of severe birth defects, and one judge has expressed sympathy for Zika-infected women carrying babies with microcephaly. But this last-ditch legal route is slow and accessible only to well-resourced women.

In the 1960s, doctors in the US had in a similar dilemma. The virus rubella can cause blindness, deafness, and other birth defects. Like Zika, the symptoms of rubella in everyone but pregnant women were so mild that nobody paid much attention. Then a pandemic hit in the 1960s. Abortion was illegal at the time, but so-called therapeutic abortions—if doctors deemed them medically justified—were allowed. Few doctors actually performed them, though.

The media picked up on the plight of white, middle-class mothers seeking abortions after getting rubella. LIFE even ran a cover story. That narrative ran counter to the stereotype of abortion-seeking women as poor, unmarried, and somehow deviant. “To have middle-class white married women speak publicly about abortion made abortion respectable and decent,” says Leslie Reagan, a historian at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and author of Dangerous Pregnancies, a book about abortion and the rubella outbreak. The conversation around abortion shifted in the US, leading to state laws that decriminalized abortions and eventually Roe v. Wade.