‘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