The Growing Acceptance of a Movement That Wants to Punish Women for Abortion (Trigger warning)
(AND THE FUCKING, MISOGYNIST, PATRIARCHAL, THEOCRATIC, CHRISTOFASCIST WAR ON WOMEN CONTINUES APACE!!! )
The Growing Acceptance of a Movement That Wants to Punish Women for Abortion (Trigger warning)
PUBLISHED 6/4/2026 by Shoshanna Ehrlich
Once considered the far fringe of antiabortion politics, abortion abolitionists are gaining influence in legislatures, Republican Party politics and the broader antiabortion movement.
An abortion-rights activist counterprotests the annual antiabortion March for Life, in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 22, 2004. (Tim Sloan / AFP via Getty Images)
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.
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No Laws Exist to Control Men's BodiesAn abortion-rights activist in front of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that published Project 2025. (Probal Rashid / LightRocket via Getty Images)
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Kristan Hawkins, with Students for Life, holds up a copy of the New York Times front page from June 24, 2022, on the one-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned Roe v. Wade. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
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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.
https://msmagazine.com/2026/06/04/abortion-abolition-punish-women-republican-south-carolina/