A growing number of Republican state lawmakers are introducing legislation that would treat abortion as murder in a push to give legal rights to fetuses.
Since the beginning of this year, Republican lawmakers have introduced bills in at least 10 states, including Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, Iowa, Idaho and North Dakota, that aim to charge pregnant women with homicide if they seek out or receive an abortion.
While several of these bills have already failed to pass and the others are likely to meet the same fate, the influx of legislation shows more Republicans seeking to take a new step in restricting abortion rights: legally recognizing fetal personhood.
“That is, of course, something that the movement had always wanted, but it hadn’t really been achievable in the same way that it is now with Roe v. Wade gone,” said Mary Ziegler, law professor at the University of California, Davis.
In addition to abortion, some of the legislation calls for amending state law to classify the destruction of zygotes, embryos or fetuses as homicide.
All of the states where they have been introduced, with the exception of North Dakota, allow the death penalty for homicide cases.
The bills’ GOP sponsors have argued that fetuses are “as human as we are” and should be legally treated as such.
Democrats, meanwhile, have sounded alarms about the legislation.
“We are seeing just how much they’re interested in controlling women’s bodies in this bill,” Iowa state Rep. Jennifer Konfrst (D) said of Iowa’s H.B. 453.
Democratic lawmakers told The Hill that the bills could threaten the future of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Konfrst added that there are also concerns among Iowa Democratic lawmakers about how H.B. 453, if passed, would impact certain forms of birth control such as intrauterine devices.
They aren’t alone in opposing the push for the legal shift.
A 2024 poll from NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist found that the overwhelming majority of Americans — 84 percent — do not believe women who have had an abortion should face penalties, fines or jail time.
A number of Republican lawmakers have also voted against the bills, contributing to their failure to pass even in deep-red states where other anti-abortion measures have succeeded. Abortion has been restricted in all 10 states where legislation has been introduced this year, since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Oklahoma state Rep. Cyndi Munson (D) observed that the Republicans introducing the legislation appear to be pushing a personal agenda versus a party or caucus one.
“I think there are Republicans that are growing more weary of these types of bills, because they starting to feel the consequences of their actions, because their polling has gone down,” she said.
“I think they are realizing that this is not a political issue anymore, and it’s not an issue that is bringing people to the polls even for them.”
The bills are contentious even within the anti-abortion movement, where the “bigger, richer” anti-abortion groups have been speaking out against legislation of this kind for as long as lawmakers have been introducing it, according to Ziegler.
Students for Life of America, for instance, opposes such bills because they fail to address a “predatory industry” that exploits vulnerable women to make money and prosecute pregnant people who could have been coerced into abortion, a spokesperson said.
“Maybe instead of wasting our time on a circular firing squad and debating who can hand out the most prison sentences to prove that they are the most anti-abortion one out there, maybe get to work and elect 100 percent pro-life champions … who will stand with us to pass substantial legislation,” Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, said in a recent episode on her podcast.
Many other anti-abortion organizations have taken a similar line.
Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America “does not support legislation to criminalize women and qualify them for the death penalty,” Kelsey Pritchard, the group’s political affairs communications director, told The Hill. “No state pro-life law criminalizes women and that’s not changing as not a single one of these bills has passed out of committee.”
The bills introduced this year are far from the first that have sought to treat abortion as homicide: Similar legislation has been introduced in state legislatures for years, at least since the 2010s, according to Ziegler.
“What’s important about them is not that they’re new but they aren’t going away, and they seem to spreading, despite what looks sort of like pushback from some of the better funded anti-abortion [groups],” Ziegler said.
Three of the bills — in Indiana, Oklahoma and North Dakota — have failed to pass this year. And Georgia’s H.B. 441, which would modify state law to allow women to be charged with homicide for receiving an abortion, appears poised to fail as well.
“We’re already past the crossover point where one bill has to pass one chamber to go to the other, and it didn’t get heard in committee,” Georgia state Sen. Sally Harrell (D) said.
She added that if the bill passed, it would likely interfere with IVF access in the state — a procedure Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Brian Jones and the Speaker of the state House, all Republicans, have expressed support for.
But while none of the legislation is likely to pass in the near future, the push to classify abortion as homicide also does not seem as if it will end any time soon. After Oklahoma’s S.B. 465 failed to pass the state Senate last month, an abortion abolitionist group hinted that lawmakers should expect to see a similar, if not identical, bill reintroduced in the future.
“We abolishioners will not rest until we have effected the abolishment of human abortion,” Alan Marcicle, part of the Abolitionist Society of Tulsa, told Oklahoma Voice.
Ziegler said the purpose of introducing and reintroducing these bills could be to build more support for granting fetal personhood and criminalizing abortion.
“This is more of long-term fight rather than something you’re going to see yield immediate results,” Ziegler said.
