Antiabortion movement pivots to punishing women as abortions rise

State lawmakers in at least 10 states introduced bills in 2025 that would treat abortion as homicide or fetal homicide, a sharper turn in the post-Roe fight as the number of U.S. abortions rose again in 2024 to about 1.14 million. The push has gained force as restrictions have not produced the collapse in abortions that antiabortion leaders expected after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022.

The numbers have undercut the movement’s central promise. Even with 12 states enforcing total bans and four states enforcing six-week bans, people continued to find ways to obtain abortions through pills and telehealth, and medication abortion by telehealth became more common in 2024. That has fueled frustration inside a once-fringe abortion abolitionist wing that wants to move the fight from providers to patients.

The policy shift is showing up in statehouses. Reporting in 2025 described a growing number of lawmakers aligned with abolitionist ideas who were pushing bills that would criminalize women themselves, not just the clinicians who provide abortions. Some proposals would treat abortion as homicide, and in some cases could expose women to the death penalty. Antiabortion advocates and leaders had long said they did not want to prosecute abortion patients, but that line has become less stable as the movement’s more hardline flank has grown louder.

The legal system has already moved in that direction without direct abortion bans. Pregnancy Justice said prosecutors initiated at least 210 pregnancy-related criminal cases in the year after Dobbs, then updated that count to at least 412 cases in the first two years after the ruling, from June 2022 through June 2024. Those cases were concentrated in 16 states, with Alabama, Oklahoma and South Carolina accounting for most of them. Most were brought under child abuse, endangerment or neglect laws rather than direct abortion-ban charges.

That pattern shows how pregnancy itself is becoming a site of punishment in the post-Roe landscape. The criminal cases, combined with the new state bills, point to a strategy that goes beyond shutting clinics and increasingly seeks to police pregnant people’s behavior, outcomes and choices. Even so, the persistence of telehealth abortion and medication access has left abortion opponents still searching for a legal approach that can deliver the broad decline they promised.