Anti-abortion hardliners want restrictions to go farther. It could cost Republicans
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Two years ago next month, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the historic decision guaranteeing a federal right to an abortion.
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NANCY PELOSI: This morning, the radical Supreme Court is eviscerating Americans' rights and endangering their health and safety.
KELLY: For the anti-abortion rights movement and the Republicans who supported overturning the landmark decision, it was a victory decades in the making.
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KEVIN MCCARTHY: You know, today's Supreme Court decision in Dobbs is the most important pro-life ruling in American history. By a vote of six...
KELLY: But for anti-abortion rights opponents, it's a fight that's unfinished.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: The gutless, coward pro-life Republican will tell you abolition is too hard. Quit pestering us. The compromised and faithless professing Christian will say, why can't you just be happy with our incremental regulation of murder? We're doing good things, aren't we? To which the abolitionist replies to all of these, we will not be silent. We cannot...
KELLY: Up next, an effort to ban a drug commonly used in medical abortions, mifepristone. In several states, the drug can be prescribed in a telehealth appointment and sent through the mail. A woman never has to be seen in person by a physician.
TESSA LONGBONS COX: Nationally, extreme policies are boosting abortion rates, including a sharp increase in dangerous mail-order abortion drugs in violation of pro-life state laws.
KELLY: Tessa Longbons Cox is a senior research associate at Charlotte Lozier Institute, which opposes abortion.
LONGBONS COX: By recklessly removing in-person medical visits and safeguards, abortion advocates have put women's health and safety last.
KELLY: But opponents of abortion rights like Cox are awaiting a Supreme Court decision on the use of mifepristone.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: And millions of Americans have used mifepristone to safely end their pregnancies. Respondents may not agree with that choice, but that doesn't give them Article 3 standing or a legal basis to upend the regulatory scheme. At the outset...
KELLY: Due next month, the court could issue a decision that would restrict use of the drug, which would further restrict abortion access. That's not all. So-called abortion abolitionists want to go further. Members of the movement also want to see abortion criminalized and IVF, in vitro fertilization, banned. But unlike the fight to overturn Roe v. Wade, some prominent Republicans are prominently not on board, Republicans like former presidential candidate, Senator Ted Cruz.
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TED CRUZ: A simple, straightforward federal bill that creates a federal right - that you as a parent have a right to have access to IVF.
KELLY: CONSIDER THIS - a decision further restricting abortion rights would be a victory for much of the anti-abortion rights movement, but for Republicans who have supported the cause in the past, a political liability come November.
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KELLY: From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.
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KELLY: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. We are continuing to focus on the issues driving people to the polls in our election-year series, We, The Voters. This week, abortion - abortion rights has been a motivating political issue for generations, and this year might be the most intense for those on both sides of the issue. NPR's Sarah McCammon reports on the anti-abortion rights activists who want to ramp up restrictions, criminalize patients who pursue abortions and ban procedures like IVF.
SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: For decades, protests outside clinics that offer abortions have been a pretty common scene in many communities around the country - less common, protests at fertility clinics that offer the procedure known as IVF.
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: How many children are in the freezer here? How many?
MCCAMMON: That demonstration took place outside a fertility clinic in Charlotte, N.C., last month. Dozens of protesters lined both sides of the street as one of them preached and shouted Bible verses toward the closed front door.
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: The fruit of the womb is a reward.
MCCAMMON: They were organized by a group of activists who described themselves as abortion abolitionists who recently spent a long weekend in Charlotte meeting and strategizing. Matthew Wiersema, who's 32, is from Gainesville, Ga.
MATTHEW WIERSEMA: We want to ban IVF. We want to criminalize IVF.
MCCAMMON: Using the language of the antislavery movement, abortion abolitionists like Wiersema say they oppose all abortions, no exceptions. Many are also speaking out against IVF, at a time when most Republicans are stressing their support for the procedure.
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DONALD TRUMP: I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious, little, beautiful baby.
MCCAMMON: Speaking in February, former President Donald Trump noted that most Americans, including most who oppose abortion rights, support access to IVF. His comments came after Alabama's Supreme Court ruled that embryos created through the process should be legally considered children. Republicans there rushed to pass a law designed to protect providers from legal consequences.
T RUSSELL HUNTER: Pro-lifers are scared to death of that because IVF has not been thought about.
MCCAMMON: T. Russell Hunter leads Abolitionists Rising, a group of activists that hosted last month's gathering in North Carolina. He accuses mainstream antiabortion groups of being too willing to accept incremental restrictions and inconsistent in their message.
HUNTER: You can't say life begins at conception - OK, but we're going to allow abortion in the first five weeks, you know? Well, if life begins at conception, and you believe that human life must be protected, well, you're stuck - logically.
MCCAMMON: Hunter, who is based in Oklahoma, opposes IVF, which often produces extra embryos that are then frozen or destroyed, and he believes that embryos should have legal rights. Speaking to activists last month, Hunter said that means charging patients who seek abortions - and anyone who helps them - with murder.
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HUNTER: So we think and we know that the mother is the abortionist or the father is the abortionist. Whoever it is that's the abortionist needs to be punished. And we're not going to lie about it in order to be friends with the world because that is precisely what the pro-life movement has done and is doing.
MCCAMMON: That's a departure from the long-standing public position of most antiabortion rights groups who've argued that women seek abortions under duress and that penalties for violating abortion laws should target providers, not patients themselves. Mary Ziegler is a law professor at the University of California-Davis.
MARY ZIEGLER: And increasingly, on the pro-choice side, you have voices of people saying either, you know, abortion is really important health care, and there's nothing wrong with it - women understand what it is and choose it - or people in the abortion storytelling world say, you know, I felt no regret about abortion. I felt relieved; I felt happy - you know, these statements that I think abolitionists also have really weaponized.
MCCAMMON: Kristine Harhoef lives in Texas and has been involved in antiabortion activism for well over a decade.
KRISTINE HARHOEF: We're dealing with different types of women.
MCCAMMON: She says she's met women who were reluctant to have abortions...
HARHOEF: But so many other women who are loud and proud, and - you know, like, we had - what was it? - a year ago, two years ago, the mothers were taking the abortion pills on the steps of the Supreme Court on national TV. You know, they were not ashamed at all.
MCCAMMON: Harhoef says she's frustrated that, even after the fall of Roe v. Wade - even in Texas, where abortion is banned - women are still taking abortion pills. She's been talking with lawmakers in Texas, and neighboring states like Louisiana and Oklahoma, trying to promote legislation that would treat abortion as identical to homicide.
HARHOEF: And the penalty could be anything from nothing at all if she was truly innocent - truly forced into that abortion - to a fine or community service, to, yes, some jail time, and possibly even the death penalty if the court, the judge, the jury all deemed that to be an appropriate penalty for that particular situation.
MCCAMMON: Harhoef's position is by far the minority, even among abortion rights opponents, like Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, a major antiabortion group that opposes prosecuting patients.
KRISTAN HAWKINS: I don't think that, you know, that's our focus or has been or will be our focus.
MCCAMMON: Hawkins describes abortion abolitionists as social media trolls who do more harm than good and don't represent the mainstream of her movement.
HAWKINS: The pro-life movement opposes throwing mothers in jail who we believe are the second victims of abortion. Does that mean that every single mother doesn't know what's happening? No, that doesn't mean - there are some mothers who I agree likely know that abortion kills a human child, but that's not the strategy that's going to end abortion in our country.
MCCAMMON: On the subject of IVF, Hawkins' group and others have raised ethical concerns. She's described the fertility industry as underregulated. Rachel Bitecofer, a Democratic political strategist, says the line between the mainstream antiabortion movement and the abolitionists is quite thin.
RACHEL BITECOFER: You know, if you radicalize people and tell them to gain power - and that's what Republicans did. They've been targeting those folks for 25, 30 years now with ever-increasing hyperbolic rhetoric about abortion. So if you accept that abortion is murder, then it makes sense that you have pretty rigid requirements to stop it, you know, at all costs.
MCCAMMON: So far, abortion abolitionists have been mostly unsuccessful in pushing through laws that define abortion as homicide. But they've made some strides in state legislatures, including a bill that made it to Louisiana's House floor in 2022. In an interview with Time magazine published last month, former President Trump said he'd be open to letting women who have abortions be prosecuted. He said he'd leave that question up to the states.
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KELLY: That was NPR's Sarah McCammon. And if you want to hear more from our We, The Voters series, we'll have a link in our show notes.
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KELLY: This episode was produced by Karen Zamora and Brianna Scott. It was edited by Megan Pratz and Courtney Dorning. Elissa Nadworny contributed reporting. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.
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KELLY: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.
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