Their movement is growing
There has always been a blinding logical flaw in anti-abortion ideology: doctors are murderers but the woman who seeks an abortion is innocent. It makes no sense and cannot stand up to any rational scrutiny. Nonetheless the anti-abortion mob has always insisted it does not seek to punish women, for obvious reasons. Putting millions of citizens in jail for something extremely common and unstoppable, regardless of its legality, is completely barbaric and is not supported by the vast majority of Americans.
That doesn’t mean it won’t happen. As we’ve seen it took barely a handful of years for Republicans to decide that there must be no exceptions for rape and incest even though those exceptions had been the consensus for decades.
Hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last week, a man with a wiry, squared-off beard and a metal cross around his neck celebrated with his team at a Brazilian steakhouse. He pulled out his phone to livestream to his followers.
“We have delivered a huge blow to the enemy and to this industry,” the man, Jeff Durbin, said. But, he explained, “our work has just really begun.”
“Even the states that have trigger laws,” which ban abortion at conception without exceptions for rape or incest, did not go far enough, Mr. Durbin, a pastor in the greater Phoenix area, said. “They do not believe that the woman should ever be punished.”
Resistance to “the question of whether or not people who murder their children in the wombs are guilty,” he said, “is going to have to be something we have to overcome, because women are still going to be killing their children in the womb.”
Even as those in the anti-abortion movement celebrate their nation-changing Supreme Court victory, there are divisions over where to go next. The most extreme, like Mr. Durbin, want to pursue what they call “abortion abolition,” a move to criminalize abortion from conception as homicide, and hold women who have the procedure responsible — a position that in some states could make those women eligible for the death penalty. That position is at odds with the anti-abortion mainstream, which opposes criminalizing women and focuses on prosecuting providers.
Many people who oppose abortion believe that life begins at conception and that abortion is murder. Abolitionists follow that thinking to what they believe is the logical, and uncompromising, conclusion: From the moment of conception, abolitionists want to give the fetus equal protection as a person under the 14th Amendment.
[…]
Abolitionists have long represented a radical fringe, minimized by prominent mainstream national groups who have focused on advancing incremental abortion restrictions.
For this article, The Times spoke to one of the leaders of an “abortion abolitionist” group to understand how this fringe movement is gaining steam and what it could mean for women in a post Roe world. They want to ban the procedure without exception, criminalize abortion as homicide, and hold women who have the procedure responsible under the law.
Some readers may wonder why we focused on a group that for years represented a radical fringe that has unsettled mainstream anti-abortion groups. But now that Roe is overturned, abolitionists see an opening to advance their goals and seize the broader movement’s future.
Abolitionist views have picked up support in the ultraconservative wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination. A group of 23 abolitionist groups filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in the case to overturn Roe. And YouTube has become a place where their views now reach hundreds of thousands of people.
Though polls show most Americans support abortion rights, about one in three adults say women who have an abortion if it is illegal should serve jail time, or pay a fine, or do community service, according to a March study by the Pew Research Center. After Roe was overturned, some states have already banned abortion without exceptions for rape or incest.Elizabeth Diasfaith and politics reporter
Abortion is now banned in at least seven states, with several more to expected to outlaw the procedure soon.
But the abolitionist reach has been growing over the past year, largely through online activism and targeted efforts in some state legislatures and churches. Mr. Durbin’s group, End Abortion Now, which started in 2017, filed an amicus brief in the recent Supreme Court case overturning Roe along with the Foundation to Abolish Abortion and 21 other like-minded groups from states like Idaho and Pennsylvania. His Apologia Studios YouTube channel has more than 300,000 subscribers, and he leads Apologia Church, a congregation of about 700 people.
They see the Roe reversal as a significant boost to their argument, and an opening to advance their goals and seize the broader movement’s future.
Abolitionist views have picked up support in the ultraconservative wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination. “We have been listening to and following the wrong leaders,” Tom Ascol, a prominent ultraconservative Southern Baptist pastor, said a week after the Supreme Court decision. Mr. Ascol came in second in the recent election for president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
“The future of the anti-abortion movement will be led by those who hold to a consistent and genuinely ‘pro-life’ ethic, which is to say that since life begins at conception and fertilization, the full personhood of an unborn life must entail equal protection under the law that is afforded to all other persons in the U.S. Constitution,” he said.
“All mothers who abort their children are culpable at some level, though not necessarily equally culpable for homicide,” he said.
Some states have already banned abortion without exceptions for rape or incest. State legislatures can no longer use Roe as an excuse to avoid abolitionist proposals, Mr. Durbin said on his livestream. He urged churches to join his group and expand their protests from abortion clinics to places like Target and CVS where women might access medication abortion.
Mr. Durbin, driven by his set of Christian beliefs, and others in the abolitionist coalition recently pushed a bill in Louisiana that would have classified abortion as homicide and enabled prosecutors to bring criminal cases against women who end a pregnancy. The measure failed, but it got further than any of the other “equal protection” bills abolitionists have worked to introduce in about a dozen states over the past two years.Mr. Durbin, driven by his set of Christian beliefs, recently supported a bill in Louisiana that would have classified abortion as homicide and enabled prosecutors to bring criminal cases against women who end a pregnancy. The measure failed. Credit…Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
The bill generated significant opposition from other anti-abortion groups. In an open letter, about 70 anti-abortion groups urged all state legislators to reject such initiatives.
“As national and state pro-life organizations, representing tens of millions of pro-life men, women and children across the country, let us be clear: We state unequivocally that any measure seeking to criminalize or punish women is not pro-life and we stand firmly opposed to such efforts,” the letter stated. It was signed by groups including National Right to Life, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and Americans United for Life. Other groups, like Students for Life, say they want to “abolish abortion” and make it “unthinkable and unavailable” but oppose criminalization of women.
Privately, some leaders of mainstream groups worry about how quickly abolitionists have gained a foothold. In Texas, the Foundation to Abolish Abortion opposed the state’s six-week ban because it “discriminates against someone who doesn’t have a detectable heartbeat,” Bradley Pierce, the group’s president, said. A group called Free the States is pushing abolitionist campaigns from Oklahoma.
About one in three American adults believe that, if abortion is illegal, women who have the procedure should serve jail time or pay a fine or do community service, according to a Pew Research Center study conducted in March. Men, white evangelicals and Republicans are among the most likely to believe that a woman should be punished, the study found.
They reflect an undercurrent of the anti-abortion movement that Donald J. Trump elevated in 2016, when he said that women who receive abortions should receive “some form of punishment” if the procedure were banned in the United States, before bipartisan outrage pushed him to recant.
Already, some prosecutors have used homicide and child-abuse laws to charge women for things like inducing abortion or experiencing miscarriage; about 1,300 women have faced such charges or arrests since 2006, according to National Advocates for Pregnant Women.
Ultimately, abolitionists believe they are fighting a holy Christian mission, answerable to the God they worship.
In their amicus brief, they wrote, “The court is not only bound by the text of the Constitution, but it is also bound by the limits on human civil authority revealed by God.”
To stop a woman from entering an abortion clinic, you have about 15 seconds to make her change her mind, Mr. Durbin said, casually holding a yellow Yerba can in his Tempe, Ariz., office recently, and pointing to a stack of signs his team takes to clinics that say, “Babies are murdered here.”
Mr. Durbin is working to achieve abolitionist goals with a multipronged approach: evangelizing online and preaching at his church; training congregations on how to keep women from walking into an abortion clinic; and traveling to state legislatures to promote bills classifying abortion as homicide.Mr. Durbin attracts followers through his Apologia Studios YouTube channel in addition to his church.
The article goes on to tell his story and some of his followers and they are truly pieces of work. There’s one woman who had an abortion when she was young and considers herself a murderer:
“What upsets me most is when the pro-life industry says that women are victims,” she said. “That means I don’t have to take responsibility for myself.”
She started to cry and took her head in her hands. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
She opened her laptop and read aloud from the Old Testament. The passage was about King Belshazzar of ancient Babylon, who was feasting when mysterious fingers of a hand wrote on the wall of his imminent destruction.
“They thought they were impregnable,” she said. Her voice grew shaky.
“Do you know what I did? I killed a baby. It doesn’t get any worse than that,” she said. “Because that is what we were created for. God created us to bear children. To carry them. That is a gift, that is not a curse. That is a gift. And we are special.”
She believed what her pastors taught, even if it meant she would face severe consequences.
“I took a life, I should give my life,” she said. If authorities were to come for her, “I would right now, I would absolutely go to court and say, ‘Yeah, I am a sinner, I did it.’ And if that was my punishment, I would take it.”
After what we’ve seen these last few years do you think these people will remain fringe for long? After all, millions of people embraced the claim that Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey and Tom Hanks were running a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor. Why wouldn’t the extremist right go here? It’s what they really believe.