Republicans in 4 States Want to Charge Abortion Patients with Homicide

In three of the four states, you can receive the death penalty for homicide. This seems a little extra from the anti-abortion movement, whose laws are already killing people, with or without threatening capital punishment.

By Kylie Cheung  |  January 24, 2025 | 2:21pm
Photo: Getty Images AbortionPolitics
Republicans in 4 States Want to Charge Abortion Patients with Homicide

In several states that have banned abortion, Republican lawmakers are pushing to go further. Over this past month, four different states—South Carolina, North Dakota, Indiana, and Oklahoma—opened their legislative session with bills that would threaten abortion patients with homicide charges, according to both the Guardian, and Jessica Valenti’s newsletter, Abortion Everyday. In South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Indiana, homicide is punishable by the death penalty.

To be clear: None of these bills have passed, nor do any of them explicitly advocate for the death penalty for abortion patients or providers. But for Jezebel’s 2025 reproductive rights forecast, the organization Pregnancy Justice warned that bills that implicitly and legally advocate for abortion patients to be killed will likely increase in anti-abortion legislatures. This pretty much flies in the face of everything the anti-abortion movement has claimed about wanting to protect women and only go after providers. 

Dana Sussman, senior vice president at Pregnancy Justice, further told the Guardian that these bills are receiving surprisingly minimal outrage or media coverage. “That raises significant alarm—both that we’ve seen more than we have in the past in a single legislative session already, and that they’re not generating the level of outrage or attention or scrutiny that they have in years past.”

North Dakota’s bill, HB 1373, adds a new section to the existing criminal code to recognize embryos and fetuses as victims of assault and murder. The bill explicitly states that “‘Person’ includes an unborn child,” and would thus enshrine fetal personhood—an ideology that recognizes embryos and fetuses as people with citizenship rights at odds with the pregnant person’s—into state law.

South Carolina’s bill, H 3537, is called the South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act—referring, of course, to equal protection for fetuses; the bill cites the 14th amendment of the Constitution to assert that embryos have citizenship and equal protection under the law, and those that are aborted are victims of homicide. South Carolina Republicans introduced a similar bill as recently as 2023 but it failed to receive a vote. In December, after state Rep. Rob Harris (R) pre-filed the bill, he assured the public that women who have “natural miscarriages” won’t be punished under his bill. But I shudder to think how the state will determine what is and isn’t a “natural miscarriage.”

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, state Rep. Dusty Deevers—a notorious abortion “abolitionist“—introduced SB 456, the Abolition of Abortion Act. Abolition is a movement that seeks to end all abortion; many abortion “abolitionists” recognize people who have abortions as murderers who should face punishment. Some “abolitionists” advocate for the death penalty. “Equal protection legislation simply recognizes the basic truth that preborn image-bearers of God are equally valuable as born image-bearers of God and removes abortion as an exception in homicide laws, holding all individuals accountable under the same standard,” Deevers said of his bill.

Indiana’s bill, HB 1334, states that it “modifies the definition of ‘human being’ in the criminal code to include an unborn child.” The Foundation to Abolish Abortion praised the bill, introduced by co-author Rep. Lorissa Sweet, for combatting the “abortion genocide,” and thanked Sweet for being “on the political front lines of the fight against abortion.”

All four bills establish fetal personhood by recognizing that “killing” an embryo or fetus is the same as killing a person. Consequently, someone who has an abortion could face homicide charges and the threat of the death penalty. 

State legislatures have intermittently floated bills to classify abortion as homicide and/or threaten abortion patients with the death penalty for years now. But after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and states across the country enacted abortion bans, these bills started to become more common. In March 2023, five different states (Texas, Kentucky, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Arkansas) simultaneously considered bills that sought to charge abortion patients with homicide. The bills received national attention but weren’t brought forth for votes; nevertheless, they seemed to be a warning shot. In May, the Texas Republican Party adopted a platform that called for abortion to be recognized as homicide under the state criminal code, effectively advocating for the death penalty for abortion patients. In Texas, not only is homicide punishable with the death penalty, but the state has carried out the highest number of executions across the country.

Over the last few months, ProPublica’s reporting has confirmed at least five different maternal deaths caused by abortion bans in Texas and Georgia. The limited, available data indicates the obvious: that abortion bans are driving up maternal mortality. Meanwhile, anti-abortion attorneys and state governments have spent the last nearly three years arguing in courts that women should be denied abortions even when they could die or lose a limb. Anti-abortion legislation has been associated with an increase in domestic violence homicides. Anti-abortion activists continue to threaten, harass, assault, and make abortion providers and patients fear for their lives. 

Again, none of these proposed bills are in effect and no one who has an abortion in any state right now will face the death penalty. But the steady normalization of bills that legally recognize people who have abortions as murderers, even advocate that they should be killed, is terrifying. “The more of these kinds of bills that get introduced, people get numb to the idea of them, and they seem less and less radical,” Sussman told the Guardian. Regardless of whether these bills pass, the Overton window is clearly shifting, priming us to eventually accept what might seem unthinkable right now. 

 
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