In a terrifying escalation of the post-Roe crackdown, Republican lawmakers in multiple states are pushing laws that would allow women to be charged with murder—and even face the death penalty—for having an abortion.

A version of this story originally appeared on Bonnie Fuller’s Substack, “Your Body Your Choice.”

If you thought that antiabortion Republican lawmakers in red states like Texas, Idaho, South Carolina and Georgia would be satisfied now that they have passed extreme abortion bans in their states, think again—just doling out legal threats to the citizens in their states who they believe are aiding and abetting abortions was not enough. Now, they want to punish women themselves for getting abortions.

It’s only April, and at least 10 Republican-dominated state legislatures have already introduced bills in 2025 that would charge women who get abortions with homicide—meaning pregnant people who obtain an abortion considered illegal in these states could be charged with murder. Most of these states also allow for the death penalty to be imposed on convicted murderers.

Got that? Zealous antiabortion Republican lawmakers now are OK with deliberately killing women who defy their bans.

They have already succeeded in causing major increases in the deaths of pregnant women in their abortion ban states: New data shows that pregnant women have died at soaring rates during pregnancy, childbirth and post-pregnancy in the states that have enacted extreme abortion bans. In Texas, maternal mortality skyrocketed 56 percent between 2019 and 2022, and cases of sepsis among miscarrying women jumped by more than 50 percent as doctors delayed treatment for fear of running afoul of the law.

Delays of what used to be standard medical treatment for women who are miscarrying or suffering from incomplete abortions have led to the documented deaths of at least 10 women—in Georgia, Texas, Indiana and other abortion-ban states—as doctors and hospitals fear providing lifesaving D&Cs.

Physicians and other medical providers who might end a pregnancy are practicing in terror under laws that dictate jail sentences of up to 99 years in Alabama and Texas, 15 years in Tennessee, and 10 years in Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas, for any one who violates their bans.

Now, Republican legislators are proceeding aggressively in their quest to exact punishment on women who get abortions either by executing them, or at least locking them up for life.

Here is how they are providing the legal justification for this cruel agenda. 

The bills that they are introducing into state legislatures provide the same rights to life and liberty to “preborn” or “unborn” fertilized eggs and fetuses, as have already been given constitutionally to their mothers in the 14th Amendment.

Just read the language in the newly introduced Texas House Bill 2197. It’s chilling—especially if you are a woman living in the state. Here are the key passages:

“BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF TEXAS: SECTIONA1.AA Acknowledging the sanctity of innocent human life created in the image of God, the purposes of this Act are to: (1)AA follow the United States Constitution, which provides that “[n]o State shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”; (2)AA protect the lives of preborn children with the same criminal and civil laws protecting the lives of human beings born alive by repealing laws that permit wilful prenatal homicide and assault;’

… and …

 (4)AA secure the right to life and equal protection of the laws for all preborn children from the moment of fertilization.”

In other words, women who get pregnant in Texas—and in the other Republican-dominated states that have introduced similar bills in 2025—might as well be Noomi Rapace, a scientist in space in the 2012 thriller Prometheus, who discovers that she has a deadly serpentine-looking alien growing in her uterus.

It’s her versus the alien.

She and the alien each obviously believe that they have full rights to keep residing in the same body—at least until the alien is ready to birth itself, or rather burst itself, out of Rapace’s body. Rapace’s character knows that if she doesn’t abort the alien, she has no chance of survival.

Republicans Are Pitting Pregnant Women Against Their Fetuses

Now, here, in the real world, Republicans want to legally pit fertilized eggs against the women that carry them, even if the fetus could kill them. In other words Republicans are determined to establish that a pregnant woman and her fertilized egg which share the same body, have equal legal rights.

How Handmaid’s Tale does that feel to you?

Only when a woman’s death is imminent or she is at risk of impairment of a major bodily function, are doctors legally allowed to intervene and save the life of the mother instead of that of the fetus in most abortion ban states.

No wonder OB-GYNs in these states have told me that they have patients who are now too afraid to have any children at all since they have no right of control over their own bodies.

The introduction of bills seeking to harshly punish pregnant women are a shocking but unsurprising development. After Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022 by the Supreme Court, Republican-dominated states immediately started passing extreme abortion bans with no exceptions for rape or incest. At the time, lawmakers in those states insisted they would never legally target pregnant women who had sought an abortion.

Instead, they focused culpability on medical providers who might dare to perform an abortion that hadn’t met the state’s requirements. Republicans have shamelessly claimed that their bans (many of which provide no exceptions for rape, incest or health of the mother) are actually “protecting women”—supposedly from predatory doctors, or clinics or partners who are pressuring innocent women into having abortions against their will.

The fact that their bills used vague language to indicate exactly when a woman qualified as close enough to death or to impairment of a bodily function has predictably paralyzed doctors and hospitals. When confronted in the ER departments with women bleeding out from miscarriages or suffering gravely from ectopic pregnancies or from their water breaking far too early to deliver a viable fetus, doctors in abortion ban states now have to seek legal counsel about whether they can proceed with providing lifesaving treatment.

That’s why women like Texan Amanda Zurawski had to wait for an abortion until a lethal sepsis infection spread through her uterus and body after her water broke at 18 weeks. Or Texan Ryan Hamilton’s wife ended up passing out unconscious in a pool of her own blood after being turned away from three medical facilities while she suffered an incomplete miscarriage.

It’s only taken two and a half years since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overruling the 50-year precedent for Republicans to break their promise to leave women legally alone on the abortion penalty list.

Antiabortion Advocates Want Women Locked Up or Executed

But now the gloves are off. Fanatically antiabortion legislators are no longer satisfied with merely controlling women in their states, they are enthusiastic to do what Donald Trump himself floated in the 2016 presidential election when he said that “there has to be some form of punishment.”

And they want that punishment to be harsh: They plan to charge them with homicide if they take abortion pills or somehow are able to get a surgical abortion that doesn’t meet the necessary legal requirements in their states.

The Foundation to Abolish Abortion is celebrating Texas Bill 2197 as a “deterrent” that prohibits everyone, including pregnant mothers, from engaging in the unlawful act of prenatal homicide.

Now, there’s a new term for you to get your minds around: “prenatal homicide.”

Are we looking at a future in which Law & Order will be doing episodes with Olivia Benson investigating cases of “prenatal homicide”?

As insane as it sounds, Republican lawmakers are deadly serious about trying to pass these laws. Idaho state Sen. Brandon Shippy introduced the Idaho Prenatal Equal Protection Act in February in the state legislature, which would define life in Idaho as beginning from the moment of conception, giving embryos and fetuses the same legal defenses and protections “as would apply to the homicide of a human being who had been born alive.”

Shippy announced that he was “ensuring justice for preborn children.”

His bill would also authorize law enforcement to investigate women who have had a miscarriage if there was any “suspicion” that they actually had an abortion.

Considering that 10-20 percent of all pregnancies end in a natural miscarriage, law enforcement in Idaho sure will be busy investigating the women of childbearing age in their state.

Then there’s a whole other highly sensitive issue to contend with if Republican legislators are successful in actually passing any legal “personhood” laws to provide unborn or preborn fetuses with the right to “life” under the 14th Amendment.

These laws would also necessitate the end of IVF in these states.

In Montana, state Rep. Lee Deming has introduced a fetal personhood bill, even though voters just passed a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to an abortion.

These antiabortion die-hards just don’t give up.

IVF Could Be Banned

And they have equally determined supporters who don’t care if women suffering from infertility will be denied the opportunity to have children of their own.

Montana doctor Dr. Annie Bukacek insisted to the Idaho legislature that “IVF is where untold human lives are destroyed to bring about one life, with enormous cash profits for individual clinics.” But millions of women don’t agree.

Do you remember the devastating fallout after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last year that unborn embryos are entitled to the same legal protections as living children in that state? That meant that most Alabama IVF clinics were forced to close for several weeks, leaving dozens of women who had been undergoing treatment utterly distraught.

So much for “protecting” women.

So readers, I’ve warned you here: The war against women’s bodily autonomy will be ramped up to a never-seen-before level this year.  

As of now, none of the Republican bills that would turn women who get abortions into criminals have become law, but there’s no reason to relax on this front.

Remember when Roe first fell and we never thought there was any way that states would pass abortion laws with no exceptions for rape and incest? But they did.

Then, we couldn’t imagine that doctors would actually let women die who needed miscarriage or incomplete abortion treatment—but they did.

And whoever heard of the Comstock Act of 1873 a couple of years ago, but now we know that it’s cited enthusiastically in Project 2025 as a way to end abortion nationally without having to have Congress pass a national abortion ban.

Trump is following Project 2025, so there’s no way we should be surprised if his Attorney General Pam Bondi starts enforcing it to prevent abortion medication and surgical tools from crossing state lines.

I’m reminding you of all this to point out that what we used to think was just plain nuts has become our reality.

That’s why I’m taking these bills in 10 red states very seriously.

Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law who has expertise in abortion, thinks these bills are “more likely to pass now than they were in previous years, and the fact that they keep coming back is significant.”

And Republican state attorneys general have been rabid about enforcing their antiabortion laws.

Lauren Miller, a mom of two young sons in Texas, sued the state along with 21 other women, hoping to clarify exceptions to the state’s abortion ban. She was forced to flee Texas when she was pregnant with twins and learned that one of her much-wanted babies had a fatal condition and if he wasn’t aborted he would cause his healthy brother to die as well. Texas doctors refused to abort her unviable fetus due to Texas’ extreme abortion ban. She flew to Colorado to have a selective reduction in order to save her healthy son.

Miller is convinced that Texas Republican lawmakers are itching to charge and punish women who get abortions. She told me, “I am confident they would prosecute women. They are looking for ways to prosecute us.”

Yup.