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Unpopular abortion-homicide bills won’t fade, concerning reproductive rights advocates
Anti-abortion organizer Abby Johnson spoke at Students for Life of America’s annual National Pro-Life Summit on Jan. 24, 2026, behind former abortion clinic workers wearing “Make Abortion Murder Again” T-shirts. “I don’t think we’re going to hug and kiss our way out of this baby murder,” she told the student activists. (Photo by Sofia Resnick/States Newsroom)
Republican lawmakers in several states so far this year introduced bills that would legally treat abortion as homicide.
The proposed laws could have implications not just for pregnancy termination but for certain fertility treatments or even some forms of contraception. Despite broad unpopularity, even within the mainstream anti-abortion movement, the measures continue to be introduced and debated in statehouses, concerning abortion-rights advocates. They fear the U.S. Supreme Court might someday consider the constitutionality of such a law, premised on giving legal personhood status to developing embryos.
“Whether or not one of the laws, should it be enacted, makes it in front of the court, what it does is create an environment in which the court can seem as if it’s not being so extreme or stepping so far out of the mainstream,” said Madeline Gomez, managing senior policy counsel at Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “The court often likes to look to how many states have laws like this.”
While abortion-rights advocates are sounding the alarm on these abortion-homicide bills they say would exacerbate the consequences of state bans, supporters have grown more frustrated with anti-abortion groups and Republicans for not being fully committed to abolishing abortion. They belong to the movement’s steadily growing pro-prosecution wing and continue to develop policy and messaging strategies to promote abortion-homicide legislation.
“We obviously disagree with the pro-life movement in large part — some of their organizations have stopped bills of abolishing abortion in places,” said Virginia pastor Jason Garwood protesting outside this year’s March for Life, holding a poster calling for a ban on in vitro fertilization. “We’re obviously opposed to Democrats, but we’re also opposed to Republicans who are compromised on the issue, who say one thing and do another, Donald Trump being one of the foremost. … I mean, Republicans have Congress, and we don’t have a bill to abolish abortion yet.”
Like Garwood, anti-abortion leader Abby Johnson believes a cultural change in the U.S. on abortion will not happen without the fear of murder charges. She is planning to launch a “Make Abortion Murder Again” college tour at major state schools this spring to help convince the next generation of adults to accept a reality where embryos and fetuses will have the same legal rights as the women and girls carrying them.
“Do I want to see women in jail? No, I don’t,” Johnson said. “Because I don’t want women to have abortions. It’s like, do I want to see people in jail for drinking and driving? I don’t, but I don’t want people to drink and drive.”
Most people don’t want to see women jailed for abortion. A recent Pew Research Center poll shows 60% public support for abortion in most or all cases, with surveyed conservatives and Republicans much more likely to support making abortion illegal in most or all cases.
But University of Maryland School of Public Policy researcher Steven Kull found that when voters are confronted with the reality of criminalizing abortions in all cases, the political divide can shrink. Kull led a study of swing state voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Large bipartisan majorities in these states said they did not want abortion to be criminalized before fetal viability, including Republicans (between 57% and 70%, depending on the state).
Nationally, among those who favored making abortion a crime, 5% said the doctor should be punished, 5% said the woman, and 10% said both.
A 2025 survey published by reproductive rights legal nonprofits Pregnancy Justice and the National Women’s Law Center found that 59% of likely voters said they opposed granting legal rights to embryos and fetuses after learning about the criminal implications of these policies.
Prosecuted for pregnancy outcomes
So far this year, Republican lawmakers in Illinois, Kentucky, South Dakota and Tennessee have introduced legislation that would treat abortion as homicide in law. Most efforts have already fizzled, including a controversial amendment to a Tennessee bill that would have penalized women who have abortions, including those who leave the state to end a dangerous pregnancy.
Several legislatures saw abortion-homicide bills last year, including South Carolina, where support and the list of bill sponsors grew in 2026.
Some states already have some kind of personhood language on the books, while others, such as Arizona and Missouri, continue to consider it. And women have already been arrested and charged for crimes related to miscarriages and stillbirths, and for taking abortion pills.
In January a woman from Campton, Kentucky, where abortion is banned throughout pregnancy, was arrested and charged with fetal homicide after taking abortion pills and burying the remains near her home. Prosecutors dropped the homicide charges after a state attorney submitted a court filing saying the state’s fetal homicide laws cannot apply to pregnant women. She is still being charged with a misdemeanor related to concealing a birth.
Earlier this month in Georgia, where abortion is banned at around six weeks gestation, police charged a woman with attempted murder after she delivered a severely premature baby who died shortly after birth. As the Current has reported, one friend told a police officer the woman had taken the abortion-inducing drug misoprostol and a pain medication, but another friend contradicted that account to the news outlet and said she had only taken the pain medicine.
The woman, a mother of two young boys, also faces a drug possession charge because the Georgia Legislature, like Louisiana’s and Texas’, has placed misoprostol on a list of “dangerous” medications, along with another abortion medication, mifepristone. Unlike other states, Georgia’s abortion ban does not explicitly exempt pregnant people from criminal charges.
As States Newsroom has reported, the most serious charges are often dropped in these types of cases, but the harms related to reputational damage and incarceration can be long-lasting.
“Postpartum people are being investigated and jailed while their mugshots are plastered across the news as they endure a deeply private and personal experience,” said Pregnancy Justice Senior Policy Counsel Kulsoom Ijaz in a statement.
Ijaz co-authored a report earlier this year finding that between 2006 and 2024, states prosecuted at least 58 women after they lost pregnancies, including the handling of remains resulting from a miscarriage or stillbirth.
“Although many of these cases are eventually dropped, the damage can’t be undone,” Ijaz said.
Reproductive rights advocates say abortion-homicide bills would likely exacerbate issues created by existing state abortion bans, even for wanted pregnancies: When patients and providers fear legal prosecution, they might avoid necessary health care, including prenatal care and emergency procedures.
“By making abortion equivalent to murder or homicide, these bills are also trying to make it impossible for people to ask for help, impossible for people to offer that help,” Gomez said. “They’re meant to be isolating and stigmatizing and really saying this is the worst crime that we imagine in our code, and you should be scared to even talk about it or think about it or offer that help.”
The promise of penalty
The mainstream anti-abortion movement spent the last half-century helping to pass incremental, strategic federal and state laws that made abortion harder to access and more expensive, eventually ending federal abortion rights. But groups like Abolitionists Rising, End Abortion Now and the Foundation to Abolish Abortion are pushing for near-total bans, with only exceptions for spontaneous miscarriages and life-saving medical procedures.
More mainstream leaders like Students for Life of America’s Kristan Hawkins say abortion-homicide laws would set the movement back in terms of cultural acceptance and are not the silver bullet their supporters believe they are.
“Abortion won’t end overnight,” Hawkins wrote in a recent Substack article. “Abortions will tragically continue … just like murder and theft continue. But, at some point, there will be an investigation, arrest, and prosecution. … The story won’t be: ‘The Pro-Life Movement Wants Justice for the Preborn Baby.’ It will be: “The Pro-Life Movement Wants to Jail & Execute Women.’”
Advocates more in the middle of this growing divide include Abby Johnson, who once worked as a Planned Parenthood clinic director but has spent the past two decades encouraging abortion-clinic staff members around the country to quit their jobs with the help of her organization And Then There Were None. Her profile grew in 2019 with the release of the movie “Unplanned,” based on her autobiography about her experience working for Planned Parenthood.
Its veracity was challenged by an investigative reporter, and Planned Parenthood says Johnson has a track record of spreading false information about the organization’s mission, and sexual and reproductive health care.
Johnson has advocated in legislatures and courts, trying to eliminate abortion rights in her home state of Texas and throughout the U.S. Last month, she testified in an amicus brief arguing medication abortion is gruesome in the abortion pill case Louisiana v. FDA.
She is the rare female leader among the male-dominated groups that advocate for harsh penalties for women who have abortions. Johnson said she values her friendship with Hawkins, especially after having lost other friends and partnerships in the movement as her anti-abortion stance has become more radical. But while she criticizes the so-called abortion abolitionists for lacking grace, she criticizes the mainstream movement for focusing on regulation and treating women like victims instead of trying to deter them with harsh penalties.
“I don’t think we’re going to hug and kiss our way out of this baby murder,” Johnson told the audience of about 2,000 predominantly university and high school students at Students for Life of America’s annual National Pro-Life Summit in late January.
She said the March for Life declined to partner with her on her next movie after having sponsored “Unplanned.” She said they told her the new one was too graphic.
A spokesperson for March for Life did not confirm but shared a written statement: “March for Life deeply values our fellow movement leaders and the dedication they bring towards building a future where every life is welcomed and protected.”
Johnson said she hopes the movie and the college tour, which is still being planned, could make harsher abortion penalties more palatable across the country. Harsher penalties would have saved her from choices she regrets, she said.
“If there would have been some sort of consequence for my action at the time, I wouldn’t have had an abortion,” Johnson said. “That would have changed the trajectory of my life.”
This story was originally produced by News From The States, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
