The "Pro-Life" Movement Wants to Execute Women Who Have Abortions

They were always going to do this. But now some of the most powerful people in the movement want criminal penalties for women who terminate pregnancies.

Photo by Akira on Unsplash

It really was only a matter of time before the anti-abortion movement pulled down its “we care about women” facade and began demanding that women be prosecuted for ending their pregnancies. Caroline Kitchener, the best abortion rights reporter around, has a piece in the Times about the rise of the carceral pro-lifer — that is, the willingness of more and more abortion opponents to come out and say they want to jail or even execute women for abortions.

Some of these people are fringe figures. But many are in the mainstream. And, perhaps most troublingly, some heads of the nation’s largest and most effective anti-abortion groups are shifting from “we would never put women in jail for abortion” to something squishier — we don’t want to put women in jail for abortion right now, but we might consider it should it become more politically palatable. And they are working hard to make it politically palatable.

I say it was only a matter of time before abortion opponents began pushing to jail women for abortion because it’s baked into their claims that life begins at conception and that a fertilized egg is the moral equivalent of a born child. Many people, myself included, believe that human life begins at conception. And many people, myself included, do not believe that this makes a fertilized egg the moral equivalent of an infant — or a 38-week-old fetus.

If this is the claim — that a fertilized egg is a person and should be imbued with the same rights as any other person — there is still a case for abortion (in no other circumstance are you required to donate your organs, blood, and so on so that someone else might live; we don’t even mandate organ donation from dead bodies). But that is not the path the anti-abortion movement is following. They claim that women have a unique obligation to any egg fertilized in their body. And that to remove an embryo or a fetus is akin to killing a child — and should be treated legally as such.

They call this “equal protection,” a perverse use of a phrase originally meant to make African-Americans full citizens under the law. The anti-abortion movement enjoys doing this, stealing from equality movements of the past in order to force profound inequality on women. They accuse Black women of being genocidaires of their own children. They minimize horrific Nazi crimes by calling abortion a “Holocaust.” They call the movement to jail or execute women who have had abortions “abolition.”

The anti-abortion “equal protection” scheme is not worried about protecting women equally, or at all. Instead, the entity being “equally” protected is a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus. And indeed, “equal protection” is a breathtakingly inaccurate term here — if my kidneys are failing, I do not have a right to affix myself to you and borrow yours for the better part of a year. But they are giving fertilized eggs the same “rights” as born people, insofar as they are insisting that anyone who causes the death of a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus is a murderer and can be tried as such. In one group’s info page, they claim that they are not calling for the death penalty for women who have abortions. “Equal rights protection answers who the law protects, it does not prescribe any particular penalty,” they say. “It seeks to bring the same legal protections to preborn children that currently apply to born children.” Except, of course, there are more than 2,000 people currently on Death Row in the US, largely for murder. If women who have abortions face the same legal penalties as murderers, well — some women will be sentenced to death for abortion.

Some of the most influential abortion opponents, Kitchener writes, are starting to push the envelope on punishment and accountability for women:

“In the last four years, our attitude has lightened a little bit because we are looking at the scope of the problem,” John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life and a major force behind Texas’s abortion bans, told her. “I want for it not to be taboo to ask, ‘What is the accountability for these women?’”

Seago was talking about one novel idea: Stripping the medical licenses from any woman who practices medicine and has an abortion. But on the question of whether he would support prosecuting women for abortion, well, he was unwilling to answer.

“We want to have a conversation to talk about what is the proper approach,” he told Kitchener. “By answering yes or no, it shortcuts a discussion.”

This is a change. In 2021, he was telling the Atlantic, “There’s a question of morality: Is it ethical to penalize women seeking abortions in Texas? We have categorically argued that women need to be treated differently than abortionists. Even with civil liability, we say that women cannot be the defendants. That’s not the goal.” Apparently Seago’s morality has shifted.

This kind of chipping away is how the anti-abortion movement has long worked. There were the extremists — the clinic bombers and those who overtly supported them — and then there were the savvier lawyers and activists who penned legislation, clogged up the courts, and slowly acclimated the American public to the idea that abortion was “controversial” (despite significant majorities of Americans supporting abortion rights), that a moderate position was for abortion to be tightly regulated, and that Roe was wrongly decided. This chipping-away strategy made abortions harder and harder to get, and cemented into the American mind that the issue was morally complex and horribly divisive, and might be solved if we just sent it back to the states to decide. Now that that’s happened — that abortion rights are in the hands of state legislatures — it’s not enough for the anti-abortion movement, which wants to ban abortion for every person in America (and outside of it). But they are on the back foot in terms of public opinion. Their abortion bans are unpopular. Jailing or executing women for abortion will be less popular still. So they are doing the slow and steady work of turning the dial of public opinion — getting us used to the idea that women might go to jail for abortion.

You can see this evolution among some of the movement’s most prominent leaders. Kristan Hawkins of Students For Life, one of the leading anti-abortion organizations in the country, wrote along with anti-abortion leader Marjorie Dannenfelser that “we state again emphatically that we oppose prosecuting women for abortion.” But here’s what she said to Kitchener just a few weeks ago:

“My message is, ‘not now,’ but I’m not saying ‘not ever,’” said Ms. Hawkins, who emphasized that culture would have to undergo a major shift before she would seriously entertain a law that puts abortion patients in jail. “You have to make abortion unthinkable before you get to that point when you ask, how are you going to prosecute?”

If abortion is unthinkable, though, then there would be no one to prosecute because no one would have thought about it. Hawkins, obviously, is thinking about it — and knows that there is no universe in which no woman ever will choose to terminate.

This is what’s coming. And the US would not be the first or only country to throw women who have abortions in jail. Right now, there are several women across Central America sitting in prison, many of them because, they say, they had miscarriages. It’s nearly impossible to tell the difference between a spontaneous abortion (a miscarriage) and an abortion caused by abortion pills, which is now the vast majority of women now have abortions in states where the procedure is banned. Criminalizing abortion, and certainly criminalizing women who have abortions, turns every woman’s body into a potential crime scene: Is a miscarriage really just a miscarriage? It means any woman seeking medical help for a miscarriage would be treated as a murder suspect.

Laws jailing women for abortion will not pass tomorrow (although some legislators are indeed trying). But understand that this is where the anti-abortion movement is headed — and unless abortion rights proponents and normal people who don’t hate women can get it together (or at least pay attention), it’s where we may all end up.

xx Jill