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.
The post The Growing Acceptance of a Movement That Wants to Punish Women for Abortion appeared first on Ms. Magazine.
