On March 31, Jezebel published a story about the 10 states that have introduced legislation that could charge abortion patients with homicide—a crime that, in some of these states, comes with the threat of the death penalty. Barely two weeks later, and there’s already another state to add to the list. This week, Alabama Republicans filed a new anti-abortion bill, joining the ranks of Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, Iowa, Idaho, and North Dakota, who have all filed bills that would charge abortion patients with homicide this session.
In three of these states—Indiana, Oklahoma, and North Dakota—these bills have already failed. But legal experts still warn that whether these bills pass now, or a different iteration of them is introduced and passed later, it’s alarming that this many have been introduced at all. The goal seems to be shifting the Overton window and priming us to one day see prosecuting abortion patients for murder as normal. Bella Pori, state legislative counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, called these bills “a terrifying indicator of how the anti-abortion movement wants to escalate their campaign against pregnant people’s rights and lives,” which “should be taken seriously whether or not they pass this year.” She continued, “Remember, every cruel anti-abortion law on the books today started out as a bill that many people thought was too extreme to pass.”
The framing of Alabama’s bill, HB518, by anti-abortion leaders in the state has been especially alarming. Alabama state Rep. Ernie Yarbrough (R) introduced it to repeal a section of the Alabama code that excludes abortion under state homicide law. The state GOP previously introduced the Human Life Protection Act in 2019, which similarly criminalized abortion—but expressly protected abortion patients. There’s no such language in Yarbrough’s bill.
“Abortion is murder, and justice demands that our laws treat it as such,” Yarbrough told Alabama Political Reporter. “If you look at Alabama law, you will see there is an exemption that says that abortion is not murder in our state. It’s time we change that. This bill is simply an attempt to align our law with our rhetoric. Alabamians agree: life begins at conception, and abortion is murder. The Abolish Abortion in Alabama Act reflects that sentiment.”
Worse, Yarbrough’s bill was written by End Abortion Alabama, whose founder, DJ Parten, outright says that abortion patients should be punished, even if they’re just seeking an abortion, and especially if they “boast” about their abortions.
“The goal here is not to say who is and who isn’t going to be prosecuted,” Parten told the Reporter. “Ultimately that’s up to our judicial system… But this bill is not offering blanket immunity for a particular group of people.” Drawing from the anti-abortion movement’s latest, manipulative strategy to broadly frame people who have abortions as victims of “coercion” and falsely equate abortion with abuse, he continued, “Women who are victims, who are in difficult situations and maybe pressured to commit an abortion, we’re working on some things to protect those women.” But “women who intentionally terminate their child should not be granted blanket immunity,” Parten said. “Women openly boasting about abortions, using that language, those women are not victims. Nobody by nature of being a woman should be immune from prosecution.”
Parten further, outright stated that his bill is meant to establish fetal personhood—the legal recognition of embryos and fetuses as people, with rights that are inherently at odds with the pregnant person’s. “Babies in the womb deserve to be protected by the laws that protect us as born people,” he said. “In effect, [this bill] gives prosecutors another section of code to prosecute abortion under.”
We’re already in the middle of a crisis of people facing criminal charges for losing or ending their pregnancies. Just last month, a Georgia woman faced the threat of prison after having a miscarriage at 19 weeks and disposing of her fetal remains in a manner that local police found inappropriate. The organization Pregnancy Justice recorded more than 200 people arrested over pregnancy-related criminal charges in the year after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health—the most in a single-year period since the organization has been tracking this data. I can’t imagine that legislation overtly classifying having an abortion as murder, and further shrouding pregnancy in criminal suspicion—regardless of whether these bills succeed—will help with this crisis.
“There is no medical way to tell the difference between an induced abortion and a miscarriage, and bills like these open the door for profound abuse and control over all pregnant people,” Pori said. “Efforts to punish abortion patients didn’t come out of nowhere. For 50 years, the anti-abortion movement has pushed legislation that strips away human rights, makes pregnancy more dangerous, and positions pregnant people as suspicious and untrustworthy under the law.”
Anti-abortion activists have long tried to shield their policies from scrutiny by claiming these laws only punish the abortion provider, not the patient. Now, here we are.
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