The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

In 2022 the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the nationally sanctioned constitutional right of an abortion and in effect making it a state issue. The strategy of the pro-life movement was to prohibit abortion in conservative states and work for abortion restrictions in other states.  But abortion pills now threaten that strategy. Nearly two out of three abortions in America are “chemical abortions.”  They are especially popular in states that prohibit abortion clinics.

What is the current situation?  Daniel K. Williams, associate professor of history at Ashland University, provides a helpful perspective. “Eight states (California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode-Island, Vermont, and Washington) have ‘shield laws’ in place that specifically protect medical providers of reproductive and abortion services from being extradited to another state.  Ten other states have similar laws that generically protect medical personally without specifically mentioning abortion. Such legal provisions protect various Telehealth companies who provide abortion pills to Americans all over the nation. The federal government could override these varying and competing legal situations by making telehealth prescriptions of abortion pills illegal . . . The federal movement could also restrict the sale of abortion pills more broadly.”  It has not done so.

For that reason, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) recently introduced a bill to ban the abortion drug mifepristone and revoke the FDA’s approval of it. “In the recent past, few would have been surprised that a socially conservative Republican member of Congress would introduce a bill to restrict abortion pills. Ever since the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved this use of mifepristone in 2000, during the Clinton administration, many pro-life Republicans have wanted to reverse it—especially since mifepristone is now used in more than 60 percent of all abortions in the United States. But this time, Hawley’s target is not a Democratic administration FDA, but a Republican one. Under President Donald Trump, the FDA has expanded access to abortion pills by approving a second form of mifepristone last October. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump assured voters that he did not support a national abortion ban, and he removed a promise of a human life amendment from the Republican Party platform. Yet at the same time, he frequently took credit for the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. While some saw Trump’s mixed signals on abortion as political posturing, the reality may have been more straightforward: Trump and many of his allies have repositioned the Republican Party as a party that is mostly pro-choice—but anti-Roe. This is difficult for some pro-lifers to grasp, because many are used to equating support for abortion legalization with support for Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that declared abortion a constitutional right.”

Not surprisingly, leading pro-life organizations, such as the National Right to Life Committee, have found much stronger support for their cause among Republicans than among Democrats—especially when overturning Roe v. Wade was a central goal for the pro-life movement, as it was for decades. “But now that Roe has been overturned, it has become clear that the GOP is more anti-Roe than anti-abortion. In the last four years, the Republican states of Montana, Missouri, Arizona, and Ohio have passed ballot measures protecting abortion rights. Similarly, in the Republican states of Kansas and Kentucky, voters rejected referendums to restrict abortion . . . While 63 percent of Republican voters say they want to make abortion mostly or entirely illegal, those Republicans are disproportionately concentrated in the most socially conservative states of the Bible Belt and parts of the Midwest. In states where church attendance is lower—including in strongly conservative states that Republicans know they need to win—Republican voters are much less supportive of abortion bans.”

Willaims correctly observes that “Trump, it seems, has discovered a politically successful formula for much of middle America: keeping abortion legal and widely available in most of the United States, even while dismantling the federal protections for abortion rights that were grounded in a 20th-century liberal vision that most conservative Republicans dislike. As a result, pro-lifers have gained no traction in their efforts to restrict abortion at the national level, even though Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House. Hawley’s bill is unlikely to make it out of the Senate.”  What then is the situation?

• Pro-life success in restricting abortion pills will instead likely be confined to a handful of socially conservative states where Republican voting is also paired with high rates of church attendance. In South Dakota and Mississippi, bans on abortion pills have already passed the state legislature and are awaiting a governor’s signature.
• But in most of the rest of the country, pro-lifers have to face the reality that just because the Republican Party is anti-Roe does not mean that it will restrict the availability of legal abortion.

However, some conservative states find it impossible to accept this current situation.  For example, Williams focuses on the Texas Republican Party, which recently decided to reaffirm its platform plank calling for “legislation to abolish abortion.” At issue was the platform’s call for “equal protection of the laws,” code for legislation to make women obtaining abortion, along with abortion providers, criminally liable for homicide. “In practice, this language would subject vulnerable women to life in prison or even the death penalty,” Texas Alliance for Life said. “Texas Alliance for Life is in favor of putting abortion providers accountable, not punishing women for abortion,” the organization’s executive director, Amy O’Donnell, declared.

Williams: “But the Foundation to Abolish Abortion applauded the platform. Pro-lifers who opposed criminal charges against women obtaining abortions were ‘denying equal protection, and they’re a big part of the problem, because they’re actually delaying abolition, because they give these politicians a win without actually doing what needs to be done,’ Foundation to Abolish Abortion president Bradley Pierce said. The abortion abolitionist movement, which claims the only way to abolish abortion is to treat it as murder and impose criminal penalties on anyone terminating a pregnancy, was almost entirely unknown until the beginning of the 2020s. It’s grown as pro-lifers have become frustrated with rising abortion rates.”

“I don’t know of a single pro-life leader who would punish the mother,” National Right to Life Committee president John C. “Jack” Willke said in 1988. “I’ve never talked to an elected official who would.” Thus, the abortion abolitionist movement has divided the pro-life cause:

• The abortion abolitionist movement introduced legislation in 12 states in 2026 to classify abortion as homicide, with criminal penalties for women obtaining abortions. All 12 attempts failed, but the introduction of these bills attracted national attention even from secular media outlets.
• Some pro-lifers who are not abolitionists believe the abortion abolitionist movement is damaging the pro-life movement’s public image. “Pro-lifers have always believed abortion is killing. For decades, many have used the term murder to describe the procedure. But that does not necessarily mean they want women who obtain abortions to be punished as murderers. For decades, mainstream pro-life leaders insisted women who obtained abortions should be treated as victims, not perpetrators, of a crime. Even if churches encouraged women who had abortions to take personal responsibility for their sin and confess it before God, pro-life activists did not believe the law should hold women criminally liable for their action . . . Instead, they imposed a criminal penalty only on the person who performed an abortion. Even women who performed abortions on themselves were almost never prosecuted, Americans United for Life senior counsel Clarke Forsythe found.”

Forsythe’s detailed examination of the history of abortion law and jurisprudence—including an examination of historical studies produced by supporters of abortion rights—turned up only two cases (one in Pennsylvania in 1911 and another in Texas in 1922) in which a woman was prosecuted for her own abortion. “There is no documented case since 1922 in which a woman has been charged in an abortion in the United States,” Forsythe wrote in 2010. Numerous state courts in the years before Roe explicitly exempted women from prosecution for their own abortions, Forsythe found. “A woman upon whom an abortion has been performed is regarded by the law as a victim of the crime, rather than as a participant in it,” a Maryland court declared in 1956. Other state courts said the same, even in the case of self-induced abortion.

Williams’s research shows that “For several decades after Roe v. Wade, the pro-life movement generally accepted this long legal precedent. A federal constitutional amendment protecting human life from the moment of conception would not result in criminal prosecution against women for their own abortions, pro-lifers thought, because the law would continue to treat women as victims along with their unborn children. But by the beginning of the 2020s, some opponents of abortion found the reasoning behind these protections for women antiquated. Now that the majority of abortions are self-induced through abortion pills, can we really consider women victims rather than perpetrators of their crimes? And since courts have blocked other attempts to keep abortion pills out of pro-life states, is a law that threatens women with homicide charges the only way to bring abortion rates down, as some abortion abolitionists argue? . . . So far, bills to make women criminally liable for abortion have not gotten out of committee even in strongly pro-life Republican state legislatures. If the abortion abolitionist movement continues to gain ground, that may eventually change. But if the traditional pro-life movement has its way, the movement’s long-standing message that women should not be prosecuted for their abortions may win out in the end. For the foreseeable future, though, this division in the movement is likely to continue.”

See the series of articles by Daniel K. Williams in Christianity Today (July/ August 2026),  pp. 124-125; (May/June 2026), pp. 23-25; and (20 July 2026).