Some States Consider Bills That Would Punish People Seeking Abortions

Abortion rights advocates are closely following what they call a growing and alarming trend: lawmakers in several states have introduced bills that would allow authorities to charge people who obtain abortions with homicide.

Such bills have been introduced in at least 10 states for the 2025 legislative session: Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is tracking these proposals. Most of those states have already banned abortion either in nearly all circumstances or after six weeks of pregnancy. (Missouri and North Dakota are the only exceptions; both of them previously had near-total abortion bans that have since been overturned.) 

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The bills refer to an embryo or fetus as an “unborn child” or “preborn child.” They claim that an embryo or fetus can be a homicide victim, opening the door for authorities to charge and prosecute people who seek abortions. Some of the bills also propose removing clauses from state laws that protected pregnant people seeking abortions from prosecution. The bills include limited exceptions, such as in a situation resulting in “the unintentional death of a preborn child” after “life-saving procedures to save the life of a mother when accompanied by reasonable steps, if available, to save the life of her preborn child.”

Lizzy Hinkley, senior state legislative counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, says she believes there has been an uptick in the number of these bills that have been introduced this year, which is “very, very alarming.” Hinkley points out that many of the states considering these bills, such as South Carolina, allow for the death penalty.

“It’s very much right out of the anti-abortion playbook to be introducing bills that try to control, try to oppress, and punish pregnant people,” she says.

Three of these bills—in Indiana, North Dakota, and Oklahoma—have since failed to advance. And Mary Ziegler—a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law with expertise in abortion—says the likelihood of the remaining bills passing is “relatively low.” These types of proposals are generally unpopular; Ziegler says that even conservatives and anti-abortion activists are divided on whether to penalize people seeking abortions.

“Having said that, I think [these bills are] more likely to pass now than they were in previous years, and the fact that they keep coming back is significant,” Ziegler says. She adds that more of these bills have been introduced since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ended the constitutional right to abortion.

Typically, anti-abortion laws penalize medical providers offering abortion care. On March 17, the Texas attorney general announced that a midwife in the state had been arrested on charges of illegally providing abortions—the first time Texas officials have brought these kinds of charges forward since the Dobbs ruling. Separately, a New York-based doctor is facing a civil suit in Texas and criminal charges in Louisiana for allegedly prescribing, via telemedicine, abortion pills to patients in those states.

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The recent criminalization bills also include fetal personhood rhetoric—a legal doctrine at the forefront of the fight over reproductive rights that aims to give an embryo and fetus the legal rights of people. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order declaring that the U.S. government will only recognize “two sexes, male and female.” Abortion rights advocates sounded the alarm, saying that the order contains fetal personhood language because it claims that sex is assigned “at conception.”

Hinkley says that research has already found that pregnancy criminalization has been on the rise since the Dobbs decision. Pregnancy Justice, a nonprofit committed to protecting the rights of pregnant people, released a report in September, which found that at least 210 pregnant people faced criminal charges for “conduct associated” with pregnancy in the year following the Dobbs ruling—the highest number recorded in one year. Hinkley says that report “portended what we’re seeing right now.”

“It doesn’t matter if [the bills] pass this year; they’ll be back next year,” Hinkley says. “There was a point not that long ago when it would seem absurd to have a total abortion ban without exceptions for rape and incest, or a total abortion ban, period, without exceptions to save a pregnant person’s health, and that is the reality that pregnant people are living in across the country right now. So whether it’s this year or next year or a few years down the road, this is a very harrowing indication of what the end game is for anti-abortion legislators and anti-abortion activists.”