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Earlier this month, Kristan Hawkins, head of the influential anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, told her 85,000 followers on X that a particularly militant faction of anti-abortion activists worried her more than pro-choice protesters. “The sad thing is the people I fear getting shot by, most of the time, aren’t crazy Leftists (most of them don’t have guns or how to use them, lol)…but ‘abolitionists,’” she posted. “Think about that.” The post appeared to be in response to allegations that Hawkins and other pro-life leaders had thwarted a recent bill in North Dakota that would have criminalized abortion.

Those accusations came from the group that Hawkins mentioned in her tweet: “abolitionists,” or activists who believe that abortion should be completely illegal with no exceptions. Since the Supreme Court ended federal protection for abortion access with its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022, abolitionists have been pushing to criminalize abortion, with some of the most zealous arguing that the termination of a pregnancy should be considered a homicide and punished with the full force of the law.

Like their more mainstream pro-life counterparts, abolitionists often protest outside abortion clinics—but abolitionists also target other protesters who theoretically are on the same side. They reason that these other anti-abortion protesters are not sufficiently dedicated to eradicating abortion. “History will look back on ‘defund Planned Parenthood’ as the weakest demand in the face of a holocaust ever to exist,” reads one recent Instagram post from Abolitionists Rising, a group with nearly 49,000 followers. Some abolitionists have used violent rhetoric to advance their cause. NBC reported last year that in a 2023 speech, abolitionist leader Jason Storms said, “Guns collecting dust on the shelves are not helping us.” Instead, he called for “peace through superior firepower.”

A group of extremists, many of whom were motivated by fervent religious convictions, abolitionists were once considered a fringe element in the anti-abortion movement, even doing more harm than good by attacking the very women the anti-abortion movement claimed to want to protect. In 2022, the New York Times referred to abortion abolitionists as “the outer edge of the anti-abortion movement.” Yet Hawkins’ tweet drew immediate blowback—and not just from the handful of explicitly abolition-focused anti-abortion groups. The outcry reflects a developing trend that Cynthia Soohoo, co-director of the Human Rights and Gender Justice Clinic at the City University of New York School of Law, has observed over the past several years.

“Emboldened by Dobbs and their own rhetoric, abortion abolitionists now are pushing for laws based on their extremist, minority position that prenatal life should be treated as........

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