Inside a dingy conference room in the North Dakota state house, Texas attorney Bradley Pierce coolly made the case that the 14th Amendment and biblical scripture require the state to charge anyone who obtains an abortion with murder.

When asked by North Dakota Representative Jayme Davis (D–9) about whether the overtly Christian basis of his reasoning disregarded other people’s freedom of religion, Pierce responded with a wry smile and a comment to match. “Well, you know, I think the Aztecs believed it was okay to rip the hearts out of children and offer them as a burnt sacrifice to their gods, and I think that should be illegal.”

Pierce’s testimony in support of HB 1373, a bill that would criminalize all abortions in North Dakota, was one of more than a dozen heard by the state’s House Human Services Committee on February 5. Other supporters taking the podium that morning inside the crowded Pioneer Room included the son of Democratic career diplomat Susan Rice, the co-executive director of a Wisconsin-based network of crisis pregnancy centers, and a “post-abortive” activist from North Dakota.

HB 1373 is not a “typical” anti-abortion bill in post-Roe America. Introduced in January, it would expand the definition of “human being” in the state’s Century Code to include zygotes at “the beginning of biological development at the moment of fertilization” for the explicit purpose of banning all abortions and subjecting anyone who performs or obtains one to criminal punishment. Under this law, anyone who harms a zygote or embryo in North Dakota could be prosecuted for murder or assault, or sued for wrongful death.

Despite the impassioned in-person and written testimony from supporters of HB 1373, the bill was so extreme that even the co-director and general counsel of the North Dakota Catholic Conference testified against it, prompting the committee to issue a “Do Not Pass” recommendation. The bill went on to fail decisively in a full House vote a week later, earning a mere 16 “yeas” out of 93 votes cast.

The introduction of this extreme bill in North Dakota was not an isolated incident. This year alone, at least 14 other so-called “abortion abolition” bills have already been introduced in a dozen other states.

Since 2017, state lawmakers have considered abortion abolition bills in at least 21 states. Often called “prenatal equal protection” acts, most were introduced after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and opened the door to this type of legislation, which had previously run counter to SCOTUS precedent on abortion.

Even in states with severe restrictions on abortion access and criminal penalties for abortion providers, those who actually obtain an abortion are not subject to prosecution themselves. However, under abortion abolition laws, they would be.

The explicit criminal liability for the person who obtains an abortion is the most crucial difference between abortion abolition bills and other more common anti-abortion legislation. These types of bills amend state criminal codes to charge those who obtain an abortion with homicide for the “death” of their “unborn child,” including anyone who self-induces an abortion using medication legally prescribed and mailed from another state.

No exceptions are made for rape and incest. The bills do include vague, ill-defined allowances for attempting to save the life of a pregnant person, but only insofar that this attempt is “accompanied by reasonable steps, if available, to save the life of her preborn child.”

Though none of these bills has ever survived a simple majority vote in state legislatures, the rapid reemergence of abortion abolition legislation across the country indicates the growing influence of a radical, militant faction of anti-abortion fanatics whose ultimate goal is nothing short of the complete and total eradication of abortion access in the U.S.

The abortion abolitionist movement is a relatively nascent one, tracing its origins to a new generation of mostly white, male, conservative Baptists, Presbyterians, and Christian Reconstructionists emboldened by the anti-abortion stance of the Trump administration.

While anti-abortion activists have likened abortion to slavery since the passage of Roe v. Wade more than a half a century ago, the abortion abolition movement takes this comparison to extremes. Abolitionists appropriate rhetoric from the anti-slavery abolitionists of the 19th century, employing an “equal protection” argument from the 14th Amendment to compare embryos and fetuses to enslaved people.

Another distinguishing feature of abortion abolitionism is its “maleness.” For instance, T. Russell Hunter heads Abolitionists Rising, a group that organized the first abortion abolition national conference in 2020. End Abortion Now, an “outreach ministry” of Apologia Church, has an all-male staff of four, three of whom are pastors. Red State Reform, a 501(c)4 on the IRS auto-revocation list, features former pro-baseball player Dennis Sarfate as president. This is in contrast to the female figureheads of the........

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