In red states, GOP lawmakers revive an "incredibly regressive" push to treat abortion as murder

Yahoo

27-02-2025

With abortion policy left to the states, far-right GOP lawmakers in nearly a dozen ultraconservative states — already with some of the nation's strictest abortion bans — are trying to tighten the reigns even more for pregnant people by opening them up to murder charges.
Republican state lawmakers in more than 10 states, including South Carolina, Idaho, Kentucky, Missouri, Georgia, Indiana, North Dakota and Oklahoma, have all introduced bills that would redefine abortion as homicide by defining a "person" or "human being" as inclusive of an "unborn" or "preborn" child. All seek to criminalize abortion in a way that has been rejected by even the most hard-line anti-abortion states: by explicitly criminalizing the person who obtains the abortion. Though several of the measures appear stalled and unlikely to move ahead this year, more than a half-dozen proposals are still making their way through state legislatures.
Such legislation is not supported by mainstream anti-choice organizations like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, which last year issued a statement arguing that "[c]riminalizing women does not protect the unborn." But the bills are supported by the so-called abortion abolition movement, including organizations such as Abolitionists Rising and the Foundation to Abolish Abortion, which argue that abortion is murder and should be punished as such. In fact, the Foundation to Abolish Abortion boasts that it has been "involved with much of the legislation and public policy efforts across the country to abolish abortion."
Even if the bills do not ultimately pass, reproductive justice advocates argue that their mere introduction sets the stage for further, broader criminalization of people for the outcomes of their pregnancies.
"Even if these bills don't pass, just putting that thinking and that rhetoric around it and pushing forth these false beliefs about abortion and these extremely stigmatizing beliefs about abortion, they can also lend fodder to other types of bills that we see passed fairly regularly," including legislation restricting abortion medications, said Kimya Forouzan, principal state policy advisor for the Guttmacher Institute.
Forouzan added that the mere presence of these bills in state legislatures can also have a "chilling effect" on pregnant people seeking abortion care.
"People might be afraid to even talk to one of their friends or loved ones about abortion and where they can go to get an abortion because they're so afraid of this threat of criminalization. People might be afraid to travel for abortion care," she told Salon in a phone interview.
These proposals' efforts to write fetal personhood into state law is the most alarming aspect of these bills, Forouzan argued. The language contributes to a broader effort to strengthen and codify fetal personhood in a wide range of legislation, including some that don't relate to abortion at all like probate bills and taxes, oftentimes at the expense of the pregnant person.
In 2025, lawmakers in at least these eleven states introduced bills aimed at backing fetal personhood. President Donald Trump also included language strengthening fetal personhood in one of his first executive orders.
"We know that the rhetoric and often the false information that's being pushed forward by the Trump administration, by people who are supportive of the Trump administration, can have really harmful effects and it can embolden ... state legislators to push forward even more restrictive bills than before," she said.
In South Carolina, Republican state Rep. Rob Harris reintroduced in December the "South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act," which seeks to add a definition of "person" to existing state laws governing homicide and assault that includes an "unborn child at any stage of development," starting at fertilization. The bill would also ensure that unborn victims of assault and homicide in the state are "afforded equal protection" under state law, citing the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution's Equal Protection clause.
South Carolina already has one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country, prohibiting access after six weeks with very few exceptions.
While the proposal provides that the pregnant person can be prosecuted for getting an abortion, it allows that person to use as a valid defense that they obtained that care because they were "compelled to do so by the threat of imminent death or great bodily injury."
The other bills — also filed in Georgia, Texas, Idaho, Kentucky, Iowa and Missouri, which enshrined a right to abortion access in its state constitution in the 2024 election — have similar aims, codifying fetal personhood in state homicide law and, in almost all cases, referencing the equal protection clause to do it. The Oklahoma bill also includes language striking provisions that allow a person to "direct, advise, encourage or solicit a mother to abort her child." Four of the proposals — in Kansas, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Indiana — are now dead.
Almost none of the bills would have applied to situations when an abortion was necessary to protect the life of the pregnant person or in instances of "spontaneous miscarriage." All of the bills, however, would open abortion patients up to the death penalty, life imprisonment or other severe sentences if convicted.
"These lawmakers are at least positioning their states to put people in jail and potentially prison for their birth outcomes, whether it is a miscarriage, a stillbirth or an abortion," argued Ashley C. Sawyer, senior policy counsel for reproductive justice organization Pregnancy Justice. "There was a time when it seemed as if there was a lot of carefulness around protecting mothers and pregnant people, and these are vicious attacks on the liberty and the actual freedom of pregnant people."
Sawyer flagged the bills' citation of language from the 14th Amendment, telling Salon that the inclusion demonstrates an effort to "sully" important Reconstruction-era amendments intended to extend full citizenship and liberty to newly freed Black Americans.
"To borrow that language or to copy that language and apply it to fetuses, is a particularly insidious form of co-optation," she said. "It is part of a larger movement for fetal personhood and to basically say that fetuses should have more liberty, more rights, more protections than the mothers and the pregnant people who are carrying them. That is incredibly regressive, and something that signaled, I would think, to our movement that these lawmakers don't actually believe in the value of pregnant people's lives."
Harris, Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers and North Dakota state Rep. Lori VanWinkle, the Republican primary authors of their states' "homicide" proposals this session, did not respond to requests for comment. A press secretary for Indiana state Rep. Lorissa Sweets, the primary GOP author of now-defeated HB 1334, said he would pass Salon's request on to the legislator. Sweets did not respond by Monday afternoon.
Deevers' bill was voted down 2-6 on Feb. 19 in the Oklahoma Senate Judiciary Committee, receiving bipartisan opposition. In the hearing leading up to the vote, he described the lack of criminal penalties for abortion patients as a "massive loophole" in state law.
'She can buy abortion pills, premeditatedly know exactly what she's doing, look it up online, make the phone call, wait a few days, get them in her mailbox, take them from her mailbox to her house, unpackage them and ingest the pill. … This is all premeditated action," said Deevers, a self-described "abortion abolitionist," per StateImpact Oklahoma. "But our current law has a loophole that says she will not be prosecuted if she takes the life of her own child. We have a protected class of murderer in our state.'
The North Dakota bill was killed earlier this month in a 16-77 House floor vote. In her remarks supporting the bill ahead of the vote, VanWinkle repeatedly evoked the Christian God and advocated for lawmakers to "close the loophole" allowing for what she described as "murder."
"Perhaps women are going to the IVF clinics because judgment is on their womb, and God has effectively closed their womb because we are murdering massive amounts of children in our nation," VanWinkle told her colleagues. "And if we would repent and do the right thing, maybe those people would actually get pregnant."
In Indiana, HB 1334 died after failing to pass out of committee before the Legislature's Feb. 20 deadline, the spokesperson for Sweets told Salon. The Kansas bill did not pass out of the originating chamber before the state's Feb. 20 crossover deadline either.
The South Carolina, Texas, Idaho, Kentucky, Iowa, Missouri and Georgia bills, however, appeared to still be alive as of Wednesday. The Missouri House bill, though introduced in January, does not have any hearings scheduled.
Madeline Gomez, managing senior policy counsel for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told Salon that, while bills criminalizing abortion aren't new — restrictive abortion policies have been used to prosecute pregnant people for their pregnancy outcomes before — what's novel about this batch is their explicit references to prosecuting pregnant people.
While these proposals are largely stalling in state legislatures now, Gomez said it's likely that one will eventually pass in a state, especially one with a particularly strict abortion policy.
"I don't want to be alarmist, but I do think we should be attentive because we have seen over the course of the last 10 years the way that anti-abortion lawmakers have advanced an agenda in opposition to popular belief and popular support for abortion rights," Gomez told Salon in a phone interview. "Even the total bans that are in effect in states now are wildly unpopular. They go against the will of the people."
Still, she said, she's hopeful the legislation "won't go that far" and she has a "fair amount of optimism" that abortion rights advocates and other individuals opposing the bills "can push back" in the immediate future.
Sawyer agreed, emphasizing the importance of people making their voices heard, believing that their lawmakers are supposed to be accountable to them and not ceding or obeying in advance. She pointed to the success of ballot measures in a number of states in 2024 that sought to enshrine access to abortion care and other reproductive rights in state constitutions as an example.
"It is possible to protect the rights of pregnant people and protect the freedom of pregnant people and protect abortion access if people are willing to fight for it," Sawyer said. "All hope is not lost."
At the grassroots level, Angie Klitzsch, the CEO of nonpartisan activist organization Women4Change Indiana, told Salon in an email some of the key ways individuals in these states can make their opposition to these restrictive bills known: reaching out directly to state representatives to express it; participating in rallies and lobbying efforts, authoring opinion pieces in local outlets and raising awareness on social media platforms to mobilize others; supporting advocacy and activist organizations; and sharing personal narratives to "humanize the issue" for the public.
"This isn't just about abortion — it's about personal freedom, privacy, and government overreach," Klitzch said, adding: "We must continue to stand up against these dangerous policies and work toward a future where reproductive healthcare is accessible, safe, and free from political interference."