A businessman turned state representative from rural Oil City, Louisiana, and a Baptist pastor banded together earlier this year on a radical mission.
They were adamant that a woman who receives an abortion should receive the same criminal consequences as one who drowns her baby.
Under a bill they promoted, pregnant people could face murder charges even if they were raped or doctors determined the procedure was needed to save their own life. Doctors who attempted to help patients conceive through in-vitro fertilization, a fertility treatment used by millions of Americans, could also be locked up for destroying embryos, and certain contraception such as Plan B would be banned.
“The taking of a life is murder, and it is illegal,” state Rep. Danny McCormick told a committee of state lawmakers who considered the bill in May, right after the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked.
“No compromises, no more waiting,” Brian Gunter, the pastor who suggested McCormick be the one to introduce the legislation, told the committee.
Only four people spoke against the bill during the committee meeting— all women. They pleaded with the lawmakers to grasp the gravity of the proposed restrictions, which went farther than any state abortion law currently on the books, and warned of unintended consequences.
“We need to take a deep breath,” said Melissa Flournoy, a former state representative who runs the progressive advocacy group 10,000 Women Louisiana. She said the bill would only punish women and that there wasn't enough responsibility being placed on men.
But in the end, only one man and one woman, an Independent and a Democrat, voted against it in committee. Seven men on the committee, all Republicans, voted in favor of the bill, moving it one step closer to becoming law.
Men at the helm
A faction of self-proclaimed “abolitionists” are seeking to make abortion laws more restrictive and the consequences of having the procedure more punitive than ever before.
Emboldened by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, they say they will not be satisfied until fetuses are given the same protections as all US citizens — meaning that if abortion is illegal, then criminal statutes should be applied accordingly. While major national anti-abortion groups say they do not support criminalizing women, the idea is gaining traction with certain conservative lawmakers. And the activists and politicians leading the charge are nearly always men, CNN found.
This year, three male lawmakers from Indiana attempted to wipe out existing abortion regulations and change the state's criminal statutes to apply at the time of fertilization. In Texas, five male lawmakers authored a bill last year that would have made getting an abortion punishable by the death penalty if it had gone into law. A state representative in Arizona introduced legislation that included homicide charges — saying in a Facebook video that anyone who undergoes an abortion deserves to “spend some time” in the Arizona “penal system.” And a male Kansas lawmaker proposed a bill that would amend the state's constitution to allow abortion laws to pass without an exception for the life of the mother.
While most in the anti-abortion movement believe that human life begins at conception, “abolitionists” are particularly uncompromising in how they act on their beliefs — comparing abortion to the Holocaust and using inflammatory terms such as “slaughter” and “murder” to describe a medical procedure that most Americans believe should be legal in all or most cases.
Bradley Pierce, the attorney who helped draft the Louisiana bill, said his organization has been involved with many of the “abolition” bills that have been introduced in more than a dozen states. All of this proposed legislation would make it possible for women seeking abortions to face criminal charges.
An overwhelming majority of Americans said in a Pew Research Center poll they don't believe men should have a greater say on abortion policy, but that is what is happening. Experts told CNN that the male dominance fits within the anti-abortion movement's current framing as being focused on “fetal personhood” and “fetal rights” as opposed to maternal rights.
Eric Swank, an Arizona State University professor who has studied gender differences in anti-abortion activists, said his research found that while men aren't necessarily more likely to consider themselves to be “pro-life” than women, they “are more willing to take the adamant stance of no abortion under any conditions.”
The most restrictive bills, which don't include explicit “life of the mother” exceptions and would charge those who receive abortions with homicide, have failed to make it to the full vote needed for passage. But others that prohibit abortions even in cases of rape and incest have taken hold in around a dozen states, including Missouri, Alabama and Tennessee, according to Guttmacher Institute.
Those laws, CNN found, were also overwhelmingly passed into law by male legislators. While female Republicans almost always voted in favor of the legislation, gender imbalances within state legislatures, as well as the fact that female lawmakers were more likely to be Democrats, fueled the voting gap. And male Democratic lawmakers were far more likely than female Democrats to cross the aisle to vote in favor of the abortion bans, according to CNN's analysis.
The Texas Heartbeat Act, for example, outlawed nearly all abortions in the state when it criminalized the procedure as soon as a heartbeat could be detected — as early as six weeks of pregnancy. While men made up nearly three quarters of the 177 lawmakers who voted, nearly 90% of those who voted in favor of the bill were men.
Encouraging ‘sacrificial behavior'
Scott Herndon, a bearded Idaho man and father of eight, once believed abortion was an issue that should be discussed “between a woman and her physician.”
He remembers watching the classic 80s movie, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” and being relatively ambivalent about the fact that one of the characters received an abortion. He didn't become a Christian until 1996, the same year he drove his pregnant girlfriend along the streets of San Francisco on his motorcycle. The pregnancy was unexpected, but that life development, along with a newfound religious practice, led Herndon to spend a lot of thinking about “the miraculous nature of life.” Over the years he began to feel compelled to get involved with the anti-abortion movement.
His daughter is now 25, and he and his wife went on to have seven more children. A longtime member of the Idaho Republicans, he told CNN he decided to run for state Senate this year with a mission of fighting government encroachment. Herndon, who touts his competitive shooting experience in high school and college, is a staunch supporter of the right to bear arms and strongly opposes vaccine mandates. He describes himself as a “true family-values conservative,” noting that his sons help him with his home-building business while his five daughters live on the family farm, milking cows, and raising chickens and pigs.
One of his longterm goals if elected, he said, is to abolish abortion in the state.
“Success depends on changing hearts and minds,” he said. “I liken the effort to Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement for desegregation and equal treatment of African Americans.”
This comparison is one that abortion rights activists take serious issue with. “Let's be clear: appropriating the word ‘abolition' is particularly contemptuous,” a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Federation of America said in a statement to CNN. “That word is a symbol of freedom and this group wants to put people behind bars for exercising their right to bodily autonomy.”
Herndon, however, says women should embrace their instinctual “sacrificial behavior.”
“If a mother is in a life raft with a child and there's only enough food and water to save one, I'm guessing most mothers would not throw their child overboard and drown them,” he said in an interview with CNN when asked about medical circumstances where a doctor may deem an abortion necessary to save a woman's life, such as a cancer diagnosis that requires aggressive treatment.
As part of their efforts to abolish abortion, which is generally defined as the termination of a pregnancy, Herndon and others in the anti-abortion movement are attempting to redefine the term to the “intentional killing” of a fetus.
That way, they claim, the lives of mothers could still be saved as long as doctors make an equal attempt to save the fetus.
Gunter, meanwhile, said he disagrees with the medical establishment and does not believe abortion is ever medically necessary.
