It’s the last day of March, and already this year, 10 states have tried or are currently trying to charge abortion patients with homicide: Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, Iowa, Idaho, and North Dakota, per The Hill’s tracking. In all of these states except Iowa and North Dakota, individuals found guilty of murder can be eligible for the death penalty. None of these bills includes explicit language that would shield abortion patients from that.
In three of these states—Indiana, Oklahoma, and North Dakota—these bills have already failed. But legal experts warn that whether or not these bills pass this year or a decade from now, it’s alarming that this many have been introduced at all, let alone in one legislative session. It’s ultimately part of the anti-abortion movement’s goal to confer personhood on fetuses.
“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,” Dana Sussman, executive vice president of the organization Pregnancy Justice, told the Guardian in January. At the time, four states—South Carolina, North Dakota, Indiana, and Oklahoma—had just opened their legislative sessions with these bills. Regardless of whether these bills pass, the Overton window is clearly shifting.
Fortunately, even in deep-red legislatures like Oklahoma’s, where so-called “abortion abolitionist” state Rep. Dusty Deevers introduced the Abolition of Abortion Act (SB 456), the bill faces an uphill battle—SB 456 failed after facing significant backlash. However, Oklahoma anti-abortion activists have already pledged to ensure the bill is reintroduced next year.
Reproductive rights advocates warn that bills of this nature also threaten IVF and certain forms of birth control, like IUDs and emergency contraception, that are falsely equated with abortion. Georgia’s HB 441, which would modify existing state law to charge people who have abortions with homicide, received a committee hearing last week, but doesn’t appear to have the votes to pass. Protesters flooded the Georgia Capitol amid the bill’s hearing, wielding signs that particularly zeroed in on the bill’s threats to IVF.
Last year, fertility clinics across Alabama briefly suspended IVF services after the Alabama Supreme Court determined embryos are “extrauterine children” whose destruction qualifies for wrongful death lawsuits. Alabama then passed bipartisan legislation to explicitly protect IVF, but Democrats wielded the chaos in the state to warn that abortion bans and any legal recognition of fetuses and embryos as “children” could threaten fertility services.
Even as Georgia’s bill may not pass, its hearing last week came at the same time that law enforcement in Tift County ordered an autopsy performed on miscarried fetal remains. The 24-year-old woman who miscarried faces criminal charges for “concealing the death of another person” and “abandonment of a dead body,” which together come with up to 13 years in prison. Meanwhile, one of the sponsors of Idaho’s bill, state Sen. Brandon Shippy (R), argued during a hearing in February that fetuses are “as human as we are.” As South Carolina state Sen. Richard Cash (R) introduced his bill in February, he said, “For those of you who believe that a human life begins at conception and deserves legal protection… I don’t see how any of us could be satisfied with having a law on the books that does not actually protect human life beginning with… fertilization.”
Over the last several years, there’s been a steady creep of bills to classify abortion as murder, though 10 in one session is unprecedented. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, these bills started to become more common. In 2023, five different states (Texas, Kentucky, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Arkansas) introduced bills in one single month to charge abortion patients with homicide. None of these bills succeeded, but they served as a warning shot, taking us to where we are now. 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. Now, Republicans in the legislature have introduced legislation to codify this. (In Texas, homicide is punishable with the death penalty, and the state has carried out the highest number of executions across the country.)
For years, anti-abortion activists have tried to shield their policies from scrutiny by claiming these laws only punish the abortion provider, not the patient. Yet, not only do abortion bans punish patients, but they inevitably lead to fetal personhood. And this, Sussman previously warned Jezebel, “lends to an environment in which violence—whether it’s state violence like imprisonment, or interpersonal violence—can be committed against pregnant people with far less accountability.”
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