Abortion abolitionists, once considered a fringe extremist movement, are gaining political influence—pushing for laws that equate abortion with murder and call for prosecuting, even executing, those who seek or provide the procedure.
Idaho state Sen. Brandon Shippy (R) filed the Prenatal Equal Protection Act earlier this month to “abolish abortion … by establishing equal protection for Unborn Children”—making Idaho the eighth state in which such a bill has been filed this year, joined by Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas, according to the Foundation to Abolish Abortion (FAA).
A similar bill has been introduced at the federal level by Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.). It currently has about 70 Republican co-sponsors. Its passage (though unlikely) would, of course, result in a national abortion ban.
As Jessica Valenti reported, the FAA, and most likely its president Bradley Pierce, who “for years … has been lobbying lawmakers to punish women who have abortions and drafting model legislation for them,” played a key role in drafting the legislation in all eight states.
These bills all call for the criminalization of abortion as murder without exception (unless possibly to save the life of the pregnant person) and the punishment of women who have abortion as murderers. In some of the above states, anyone who terminates a pregnancy could be eligible for the death penalty. (Very “pro-life”!)
The use of the descriptor “abolitionist” is a deliberate choice intended to showcase that they are the true heirs apparent of the 19th-century movement to abolish slavery. As one member of Abolitionists Rising explained,
“We believe that human beings are made in the image of God. And just because you pass laws that say a particular set of human beings can be destroyed or can be treated as though they don’t have their own bodies … or you can kill them … those laws in that practice need to be abolished. So, it’s not just like an analogical argument. It’s actually like a historical continuity.”
These proposed laws grotesquely attempt to treat a fetus as the moral and legal equivalent of an enslaved human being. Instead, the reproductive justice framework recognizes that the act of forcing Black women to “reproduce against their will is itself a horrific structure of slavery” and that “freedom—for themselves, for their families, for their communities, for their race—is impossible without the ability to control their reproductive capacities.”
Abolitionists have long been considered an extremist fringe of the antiabortion movement without much influence. According to Political Research Associates, based on a common Christian Reconstructionist belief that “biblical law should supersede U.S. law,” abortion abolitionists have shared a “movement ecosystem [with] far-right and Christian nationalist organizations.” However, the dramatic increase in the number of abolitionist bills that have been filed by state lawmakers since the overturning of Roe v. Wade suggests that abortion abolitionists are gaining influence.
Their growing visibility was given a boost by the all-male panel of religious leaders who spoke at a week-long event in 2023 hosted by Operation Save America (OSA), the contemporary incarnation of Operation Rescue, which terrorized abortion clinics and providers in the late 1980’s through the 1990’s. OSA is classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “male supremacist hate group”—a well-earned characterization, based on views such as that of a former director who stressed to the audience that “the taking of an innocent life … has a voice calling out for vengeance,” and that if “you’re going to shed blood in the womb, you’re going to reap it in the streets.” It also reflects the reality—as exemplified by this panel—that men have near total control of the abolitionist reins.
The panelists at the OSA event highlighted the deep-seated antipathy that abolitionists have for the so-called mainstream pro-life movement. Their aversion stems from what they regard as two fundamental differences between them:
- The mainstream support for “incremental steps like heartbeat bills,” which one speaker characterized as “a lie from the pit of hell”—a view based on the failure to treat abortion as murder by calling for its immediate end without exception.
- The “heretical teaching … that women should be allowed to kill their own children with immunity and impunity because they themselves are victims of abortion,” as another member of the panel put it. The references to “hell” and “heretical thinking” also signpost the general abolitionist view that pro-lifers are plagued by “unbiblical beliefs” leading to “political actions that [are] often heinously unbiblical.”
The demand that “aborting mothers” be prosecuted for murder is at the heart of the abolitionists’ equal protection frame. As they argue, the “only way to provide equal protection for children in the womb is to make sure that no one is allowed to take their lives.”
This is a direct refutation of the view held by many in the mainstream antiabortion movement that women are the victims of a rapacious abortion industry which coerces them into killing their unborn children. Instead, abortion abolitionists hold a steadfast belief that a “woman who knowingly and intentionally commits the murder of her preborn child is not a victim of coercion, but a principal actor in the death of her own child.”
In a YouTube series entitled “This is Why,” Zachary Conor, communications director for End Abortion Now, twists research data from the Guttmacher Institute to support the abolitionist demand for vengeance against those who opt for abortion over parenthood. Conor’s representation is a cruel distortion of the study’s main finding—which underscores the integrity of the abortion decision-making process of the participants, namely that they:
- emphasized their “conscious examination of the moral aspects of abortion”;
- “independently [made] the decision to have an abortion,” with fewer than 1 percent citing the undue influence of others;
- based their decisions “largely on their ability to maintain economic stability and to care for the children they already have.”
Instead, Conor insists these findings demand their punishment as murderers for having “violated their god given moral instrument that distinguishes between right and wrong.”
Make no mistake: The appropriation of the civil rights language of equality is a rhetorical move aimed at obfuscating the absolutist and harshly punitive abolitionist endgame of sending women to jail or possibly to their death for making their own reproductive decisions. It comes at a time when—as Joseph Bernstein put it in a recent New York Times op-ed—the “‘manosphere’ enjoys its new status as the lifestyle media arm for Mr. Trump’s young supporters, and now wields political power of its own” and stands as a powerful reminder of what we have known for a long time: Banning abortion is about controlling women’s bodies.
