Once considered the far fringe of antiabortion politics, abortion abolitionists are gaining influence in legislatures, Republican Party politics and the broader antiabortion movement.
When South Carolina’s abortion abolitionist bill, the Unborn Child Protection Act (S. 1095), was voted out of committee and onto the full Senate floor in late April—“an unprecedented move toward locking up women who have an abortion,” according to Dana Sussman in Slate—it raised a question: How much influence have abortion abolitionists gained within the broader antiabortion movement?
Abortion abolitionists, who seek to criminalize abortion without exceptions and punish women who obtain abortions as murderers, have long been considered the outer fringe of the antiabortion movement. Their roots can be traced to what Colleen Scerpella described in The Prospect as “a new generation of mostly white, male, conservative Baptists, Presbyterians and Christian Reconstructionists”—or what she calls “extreme Christian patriarchy.”
As I wrote in Ms. a little more than a year ago, the dramatic increase in abortion abolitionist bills filed by state lawmakers after Roe v. Wade fell, signaled the growing influence of this movement.
That extremism has not gone unnoticed: In 2024, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified four abolitionist organizations as “male supremacist hate groups.” Recent research has likewise found that the strongest supporters of arresting women who have abortions are Americans who endorse Christian nationalism, believe “true Americans are white,” and look to the state to enforce a particular ethnocultural social order.
The South Carolina bill, which makes the pregnant woman herself subject to misdemeanor liability, prompted me to revisit the question of whether abortion abolitionists have made more inroads into the mainstream antiabortion movement.
The evidence suggests they have.
A Refresher on Abortion ‘Abolitionists’
Abortion abolitionists reject the incremental approach favored by what is commonly called the “mainstream pro-life movement.” While many antiabortion organizations argue that laws protecting fetuses should not punish pregnant women—whom they often portray as victims of abortion providers—abolitionists insist that abortion should be treated as murder in all circumstances, and that those who obtain abortions should face the same criminal penalties as any other person accused of homicide.
Central to their ideology is the belief that fetuses are entitled to the equal protection of the law from the moment of fertilization. This conviction has given rise to so-called “equal protection” bills—personhood-style measures that seek the criminalization of abortion as murder. States considering so-called equal protection abortion bills include Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina and Texas, with similar measures introduced and later stalled in Indiana, North Dakota and Oklahoma.
In states where the death penalty remains legal, critics warn that such laws could theoretically expose people who obtain abortions to capital punishment.
Abolitionists justify their movement’s problematic name by arguing that there is a valid historical analogy between enslaved people and fetuses: As Rick Clayborn writes for the National Legal Foundation, just as enslaved people could be harmed or killed by their owners without legal consequences, “unborn children may be poisoned, dismembered and killed by their owners/mothers without fear of criminal prosecution.”
The comparison fundamentally misunderstands both slavery and reproductive freedom. As Leah Berkenwald wrote for Ms., “The slavery analogy only makes sense if you believe having an abortion is somehow equivalent to owning a human being.” In fact, she argues, the comparison points in the opposite direction: “Slavery is about losing one’s freedom and personal autonomy over one’s body and life.”
Holly Townsend makes a similar case in her article “Second Middle Passage: How Anti-Abortion Laws Perpetuate Structures of Slavery and the Call for Reproductive Justice.” Townsend argues that “the basic effects of anti-abortion laws are to force reproduction,” and that compelling women to reproduce against their will is itself “a horrific structure of slavery,” one that has a disproportionate impact on Black and Brown women.
The Growing Status of Antiabortion Laws
“The antiabortion movement crossed a major new red line” when South Carolina’s Senate Medical Affairs Committee voted to send S. 1095 to the full Senate chamber for consideration, Dana Sussman wrote for Slate. Although the legislative session ended before the bill could be taken up by the chamber, the vote marked an unprecedented step toward legislation that would criminalize women who obtain abortions.
Yet the development should not have come as a surprise: According to the Foundation to Abolish Abortion (FAA), support for so-called “equal protection” legislation has reached record levels.
Part of that success can be traced to a deliberate political strategy. As Sean Beedle reported in the Colorado Times Recorder, FAA president Bradley Pierce has encouraged supporters to pursue a precinct-level organizing model aimed at influencing local Republican lawmakers. The approach resembles the grassroots strategy promoted by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, which has helped activists gain influence within state and county Republican parties. The effort has already produced results: In 2024, Pierce’s home state of Texas became the first in the nation to endorse abortion abolitionism in its Republican Party platform.
The legislative arena is not the only place where abolitionists appear to be gaining ground. Jessica Valenti recently described the movement’s growing acceptance within the broader antiabortion movement as “the biggest shift in antiabortion politics in decades.”
After years of insisting that women should not be punished for obtaining abortions, Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins—one of the most prominent figures in the movement’s mainstream wing—issued a statement celebrating South Carolina’s abolitionist bill. The endorsement was striking given that, only a year earlier, Hawkins had publicly criticized abolitionists, posting on X that the people she most feared being “shot by” were not “crazy Leftists” but abolitionists themselves.
The reaction to Hawkins’ endorsement revealed another defining feature of the abolitionist movement: its embrace of male leadership and patriarchal gender roles: By somehow managing to cast Hawkins as a feminist, abolitionists seized on the moment to argue that the antiabortion movement had been weakened by feminism and that men should be leading the fight.
As Ben Zeisloft, author of Forsaking of the Fatherless: The Secret Treachery of the “Pro-Life” Establishment, posted on X, “Feminism is the main reason abortion exists,” and therefore “we need Christian men leading the fight against abortion.”
The response was enthusiastic. One commenter declared that “men should totally be the ones leading the fight,” while another described feminism as “the demonic root” of abortion, transgender rights and sexual liberation.
That worldview is increasingly finding organizational expression. Pate Anglin, founder and president of Students for Abolition (SFA), has described the organization as emerging from the prayers of “young Godly guys” seeking to “push back against this darkness” and “hold back those being led to the slaughter.”
With 13 chapters across the United States and one in Canada, SFA welcomes women as members but explicitly calls on men to lead. Anglin argues that men are the “providers, protectors and defenders of the weak” and should therefore lead “this cultural battle.” Women, by contrast, are encouraged to embrace what he describes as “biblical femininity” rather than taking on roles traditionally associated with men.
The victim narrative advanced by the mainstream antiabortion movement is troubling in its own right, casting women who obtain abortions as passive dupes of the abortion industry. But there is something particularly chilling about the growing acceptance of a male-led movement that insists women should be criminally punished for exercising control over their reproductive lives.
That this demand is packaged in the language of abolition only compounds the harm. As Imani Gandy has argued, abolitionist rhetoric seeks to cloak these positions in moral legitimacy while pressing “this country’s brutal racial history” into service to score political points against ideological opponents.
The movement’s hostility toward women is perhaps most evident in its rejection of what SFA president Anglin calls “toxic empathy”—the belief that women who obtain abortions deserve compassion rather than punishment. For abolitionists, abortion is not merely a tragedy, but evidence of profound moral depravity.
Capturing this worldview, pastor Joel Webbon, host of the podcast Theology Applied, argued that women who obtain abortions are not victims at all. Abolitionists, he claimed, are uniquely willing to acknowledge how “wicked” and “sinister” such women are. “They love killing children,” he said. “They’re not victims. They love murder.”
The movement’s insistence that women who obtain abortions should be punished as murderers echoes some of the same gendered assumptions that shaped the nation’s earliest abortion laws.
Notably, these laws are the product of the 19th-century campaign by physicians who regarded it as their “manly duty” to speak out against what they regarded as the growing evil of induced abortions by white, married and middle-class, Protestant women. (Alesha E. Doan and I write about this in our book Abortion Regret: The New Attack on Reproductive Freedom.) One of the movement’s leaders, Boston physician Dr. Horatio Storer, called for “a bold and manly utterance of the truth” against what he described as “the most horrid social enormity of the age.”
Coming full circle, given the origin story of our country’s criminal abortion laws, it is not surprising that the strongest supporters for punishing women who have abortions are often Christian and/or white nationalists, who look to “the state to enforce a particular ethnocultural social order,” write researchers Darci K. Schmidgall, Samuel L. Perry and Joshua B Grubbs.
Dobbs appears to have created new space for the revival of that rhetoric—one that is steeped in the misogynistic and racialized assumptions of the 19th-century antiabortion movement but repackaged through the modern language of abolition and equal protection.
Look to these trusted groups if you or a loved one needs to know more about reliable abortion care:
- A one-stop-shop for abortion seekers: I Need An A
- Other websites to explore all your options for abortion care: Plan C Pills, Abortion Finder
- Safe websites to buy abortion medication: Aid Access, Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, Hey Jane
- If you need help affording abortion care, tell your telemedicine provider or contact an abortion fund near you.
- To protect your digital privacy when planning your abortion, click here.
- For free legal help as a patient or doctor, call If/When/How’s Repro Helpline—844-868-2812—or contact Pregnancy Justice.
- For medical advice, contact the Miscarriage & Abortion Hotline: 833-246-2632.
- If you need to know the abortion law in your state, look to the Center for Reproductive Rights. or Guttmacher Institute.
