A once-fringe idea is edging closer to the political mainstream: prosecuting women who get abortions as if they had committed homicide. According to reporting from NOTUS, lawmakers in at least 13 states have introduced “abortion abolitionist” bills that would classify abortion as homicide and let prosecutors charge the patients themselves — and the effort is gathering more support on the right than it had just a few years ago.
A Line That Used to Be Bright
For most of the post-Roe era, even the strictest anti-abortion laws drew a hard distinction between providers and patients. The aim was to punish doctors and clinics — not the pregnant person. Many state bans were written with explicit carve-outs shielding patients from prosecution, and mainstream anti-abortion organizations made a point of saying publicly that women should never face criminal charges for ending a pregnancy.
That distinction was not an accident. It was a political and strategic choice, designed to keep the movement from being seen as targeting women directly. The “abortion abolitionist” wing rejects that compromise outright. In their framing, a fetus is a person from the moment of conception, and ending a pregnancy is therefore the unlawful killing of a person — with the patient as the responsible party.
What the Bills Actually Do
The legislation moving through statehouses would do more than ban abortion. It would amend state criminal codes so that a patient who ends a pregnancy — including by taking medication mailed from another state — could be charged under existing homicide statutes. That means the same legal framework used to prosecute someone for killing another person could be turned on a woman for a decision about her own body and health.
NOTUS reports that the movement to prosecute women who have abortions is growing, with bills introduced in at least 13 states. The strategy, according to advocates tracking it, is to “flood the zone” with legislation that establishes fetal personhood in state law, normalizing the idea over time even when individual bills fail.
Still a Minority Position — For Now
It is important to be precise about where this stands. None of these bills have become law. Legislation that would criminally punish patients has not passed a single state legislature. And most prominent anti-abortion leaders continue to publicly oppose prosecuting patients, wary of both the politics and the optics of charging women with murder.
In other words, this remains a minority position within the broader anti-abortion movement. But “minority” is not the same as “marginal.” The people who monitor these efforts warn that the support base is no longer confined to the fringe — and that ideas once dismissed as too extreme to take seriously have a way of migrating toward the center of a party’s debate.
What This Means for Americans
The stakes are blunt. If even one of these measures becomes law, a woman in that state could face a homicide charge for ending a pregnancy — a prosecution that could carry decades in prison. The exposure would fall hardest on those with the fewest resources: patients who cannot travel, who rely on mailed medication, or who lack the means to fight a felony case. The push to criminalize patients is not abstract policy debate; it is a question of whether the government can treat a personal medical decision as murder.
For now, the trend is a growing push rather than enacted nationwide law. But the direction of travel — from fringe to mainstreaming — is exactly what makes it worth watching closely.
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