USA – How idea of charging women with murder infiltrated the anti-abortion movement

‘Abolitionists’ have migrated out of the fringes and moved toward the center of movement alongside Republicans’ penchant for punishment

Carter Sherman
Wed 23 Apr 2025

So far this year, lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation that would treat fetuses as people and leave women who have abortions vulnerable to being charged with homicide – a charge that, in several of these states, carries the death penalty.

Once seen as politically toxic, this kind of legislation has become more popular in the years since Roe v Wade fell, erasing the national right to abortion. This likely comes as no surprise to Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law and one of the foremost commentators on the US abortion wars. The anti-abortion movement, she writes in her new book Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction, has really “always been a fetal-personhood movement” – one that is so emboldened, it is increasingly unconcerned with public opinion or even democratic norms.

Continued; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/23/anti-abortion-fetal-personhood

USA – Project 2025 and Vance agree: “The Dobbs decision is just the beginning.”

Shawn Musgrave
July 17 2024

DONALD TRUMP HAS tried to distance himself from Project 2025, the conservative playbook for a new Trump administration penned by dozens of right-wing organizations — and especially its hard-line anti-abortion proposals.

In the lead-up to the Republican convention, many credulously lauded Trump for “softening” or “moderating” the GOP platform on the issue, despite the fact that the platform proposes fetuses and embryos already have full constitutional rights.

Continued: https://theintercept.com/2024/07/17/jd-vance-trump-project-2025/

USA – The Right’s War on Abortion Was Never About Legal Doctrine

The justices in the Dobbs majority promised to return abortion “to the people’s elected representatives.” For conservative activists, this was just the beginning.

BY PETER SHAMSHIRI
MAY 30, 2023

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court’s conservatives tried to couch the decision in moderated, legalistic terms.

In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the Court was simply returning the power to regulate abortion “to the people’s elected representatives.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed a platitude-ridden concurrence stating that “on the issue of abortion, the Constitution is neither pro-life nor pro-choice. The Constitution is neutral.” Both justices were making the same point. They were claiming that the decision did not speak to the propriety of abortion, but instead was a judgment only about the scope of the Constitution.

Continued: https://ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics/dobbs-opinion-never-about-legal-doctrine/

30.05.2023

Commentary

14th Amendment

Brett Kavanaugh

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Federal judge says constitutional right to abortion may still exist, despite Dobbs

The judge said the Supreme Court’s ruling concluded only that the 14th Amendment included no right to abortion, but stopped short of definitively ruling out other aspects of the Constitution.

By KYLE CHENEY and JOSH GERSTEIN
Feb 6, 2023

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., suggested Monday that there may be a constitutional right to abortion baked into the 13th Amendment — an area she said went unexplored by the Supreme Court in its momentous decision last year overturning Roe v. Wade.

In a pending criminal case against several anti-abortion activists, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization concluded only that the 14th Amendment included no right to abortion but stopped short of definitively ruling out other aspects of the Constitution that might apply.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/06/federal-judge-constitutional-right-abortion-dobbs-00081391

06.02.2023

News

13th Amendment

14th Amendment

Colleen Kollar-Kotelly

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Equal Rights Amendment

involuntary servitude

Republicans won’t stop until abortion is banned across America. And it could be

It is time for liberal Americans, and all American women, to face this reality: there will soon be no safe states

Moira Donegan
Thu 15 Sep 2022

Republicans want to ban abortion nationwide, and they have the nerve to claim that this is a compromise. This week, Senator Lindsay Graham, of South Carolina, introduced a bill to ban all abortions everywhere in the United States at 15 weeks. Abortion is already banned before 15 weeks in 15 states.

It is banned outright in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. Indiana’s ban on abortion went into effect just this Wednesday. It is banned at six weeks – in practice a total ban – in Georgia and Ohio. West Virginia passed an abortion ban, too. It won’t be the last.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/15/republicans-wont-stop-until-abortion-is-banned-across-america-and-it-could-be

15.09.2022

national abortion ban

USA – The Next Step in the Anti-Abortion Playbook Is Becoming Clear

Aug. 31, 2022
By Mary Ziegler

Two months after the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion has been banned or severely restricted in at least 14 states, energizing leaders of the anti-abortion movement but also activating voters who are opposed to many of these measures. With so much at stake in the next few election cycles — and women’s lives hanging in the balance — both sides of this fight are strategizing their next moves.

For the anti-abortion movement, the emerging plan is an all-out fight for fetal personhood. In many ways this is no surprise — since the 1960s, the movement’s ultimate goal has been to secure legal protections for fetuses and embryos, despite the harm that could be done to the health and livelihoods of pregnant women. The recognition of fetal personhood nationwide could mean a total ban on abortion for everyone in the United States, and if an increasingly sophisticated minority of anti-abortion extremists have their way, many more women would face criminal charges for ending their pregnancies.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/31/opinion/abortion-fetal-personhood.html

31.08.2022

Featured

Opinion

14th Amendment

Americans United for Life

USA – Is a Fetus a Person? An Anti-Abortion Strategy Says Yes.

Fetal personhood, which confers legal rights from conception, is an effort to push beyond abortion bans and classify the procedure as murder. In Georgia, it also means a $3,000 tax credit.

By Kate Zernike
Aug. 21, 2022

Even as roughly half the states have moved to enact near-total bans on abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, anti-abortion activists are pushing for a long-held and more absolute goal: laws that grant fetuses the same legal rights and protections as any person.

So-called fetal personhood laws would make abortion murder, ruling out all or most of the exceptions for abortion allowed in states that already ban it. So long as Roe established a constitutional right to abortion, such laws remained symbolic in the few states that managed to pass them. Now they are starting to have practical effect. Already in Georgia, a fetus now qualifies for tax credits and child support, and is to be included in population counts and redistricting.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/us/abortion-anti-fetus-person.html

USA – Inside the Extreme Effort to Punish Women for Abortion

Abortion “abolitionists” are the outer edge of the anti-abortion movement. They’re looking to gain followers after the decision to overturn Roe, unsettling mainstream anti-abortion groups.

By Elizabeth Dias
July 1, 2022

Hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last week, a man with a wiry, squared-off beard and a metal cross around his neck celebrated with his team at a Brazilian steakhouse. He pulled out his phone to livestream to his followers.

“We have delivered a huge blow to the enemy and to this industry,” the man, Jeff Durbin, said. But, he explained, “our work has just really begun.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/us/abortion-abolitionists.html

The state fighting to dismantle abortion rights has a long history of permissive abortion laws

by Isabelle Taft
June 8, 2022

When Mississippi asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, it argued that a long tradition of state restrictions on abortion in the U.S. “defeats any claim of a deeply rooted right” to an abortion.

Yet for all but 21 of its 156 years as a state prior to Roe, Mississippi law technically permitted abortion for any reason until about 16 weeks of pregnancy.

Continued: https://mississippitoday.org/2022/06/08/mississippi-abortion-history/

USA – The Right to Reproductive Autonomy: A 14th Amendment Guarantee

5/24/2022
by DIANA KASDAN and RISA KAUFMAN

Despite the Supreme Court’s expected ruling, a correct understanding of the Constitution guarantees the legal right to reproductive autonomy: reclaiming the full promise of the 14th Amendment.

The Supreme Court will soon issue its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. A decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which the leaked opinion indicates a majority of the Court is prepared to do, would be egregiously wrong and have devastating impact nationwide. But whether the Court explicitly dismantles Roe or stops short of rejecting constitutional protection for abortion, we must continue fighting to secure the full promise of the 14th Amendment. Under a correct understanding of its multiple and interdependent guarantees, a future with stronger constitutional protection for reproductive autonomy is both necessary and possible.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2022/05/24/right-to-abortion-constitution-14th-amendment-freedom/