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Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, conservative states have stressed that they won’t prosecute women, whom they describe as abortion’s “second victims.” That was the message Texas hoped to send when prosecutors in Starr County dropped charges against a woman named Lizelle Herrera for ending her pregnancy. But Herrera’s case is now communicating something else entirely: Prosecutors who target women for abortion often won’t face any consequences, even when they ignore the law.

In 2022 Herrera, who now goes by Lizelle Gonzalez, took the abortion pill misoprostol when she was 19 weeks pregnant. After she suffered complications, she went to a county hospital, and following her discharge, a health care provider tipped off local law enforcement. Then, Gonzalez was arrested.

The arrest never should have happened. Though Texas’ S.B. 8 made it a civil offense to provide or aid an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, the law protected abortion seekers from suit. State law prohibits the prosecution of women for abortions too. Eventually, that reality caught up to county prosecutors, who released Gonzalez after she spent two days in jail. The Texas bar subsequently disciplined Gocha Allen Ramirez, the Starr County district attorney, and Gonzalez filed a civil-rights suit against him and other officials involved in her arrest.

The stakes of Gonzalez’s suit are high because there has been a significant uptick in prosecutions related to conduct during pregnancy, especially in the years since the SCOTUS reversal of Roe. If officials don’t even have to have a legal basis for charges, the number of prosecutions will only increase.

And the spike we’ve seen so far isn’t an accident. The anti-abortion movement has long fought for fetal personhood, the idea that constitutional rights begin at fertilization, and that enforcement of those rights requires the........

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