The Real Reason North Carolina’s GOP Is Proposing the Most Radical Anti-Abortion Bill Yet

Another anti-abortion abolitionist proposal has been in the news. This time, conservative lawmakers in North Carolina have asked voters to approve a state constitutional amendment recognizing the personhood of embryos and establishing that anyone who ends an embryonic life is guilty of first-degree murder. Those penalties might also apply to people pursuing in vitro fertilization or using some contraceptives, given that abortion foes sometimes view either as requiring the taking of unborn life. And that’s the most ordinary part of the proposal: The bill also provides that private individuals have a right to use deadly force to prevent “the willful destruction of life.” House Bill 1232 isn’t clear about exactly who could exercise this constitutional right to vigilante violence. Would it just be available to those seeking to kill abortion providers and patients? Or might it apply even more broadly to those seen to aid them?

The bill has been greeted with bafflement and disbelief. One of its co-sponsors was embarrassed enough to remove his name from the proposal. But the idea of licensing private violence did not come out of thin air. There have been decades of debate about the use of force within the anti-abortion movement. And as conservatives embrace an increasingly punitive agenda, old justifications for violence have reemerged.

Since the 1960s, abortion foes have rallied around the idea that constitutional rights begin the moment an egg is fertilized. That meant that liberal abortion laws would violate the federal Constitution. Because that claim didn’t gain traction in the federal courts, abortion opponents didn’t have to settle what it would mean in practice to enforce this idea of personhood. Did it require that abortion be punished as murder, or that women be punished? Might it instead require more support for women during pregnancy?

By the 1980s, as the anti-abortion movement aligned with the Republican Party, the movement’s leaders increasingly retooled their ideas of justice for the unborn to fit the GOP’s tough-on-crime agenda. They endorsed fetal homicide laws and backed prosecutions based on conduct during pregnancy. But these moves didn’t lead to the reversal of Roe, much less a decline in the abortion rate.

Frustration led to a wave of lawbreaking. Operation Rescue, a clinic blockade group, invited supporters to use civil disobedience and break the law if necessary to stop people from entering abortion clinics. Operation Rescue disrupted the Democratic National Convention in 1992 and recorded thousands of arrests. Blockaders even developed a legal argument to justify their actions, drawing on the common law defense of necessity, which allows someone to break a law to achieve a greater moral good.

Some advocates went further. If abortion really were the murder of an equal person, they asked, why wasn’t it justified to use deadly force to protect that equal person?

Prominent figures in the late 1980s and early 1990s elaborated on that argument in books and talk-show appearances. The claim justified kidnappings, firebombings, and a series of murders of doctors, clinic staff, and security. Powerful anti-abortion groups denounced the violence, but the question of deadly force struck others as surprisingly complex. If a fertilized egg was an equal person, and if the way to protect that person involved violence, why was deadly force off limits?

While violence against abortion clinics and providers never went away, it receded from the peak of the 1980s and early 1990s. The federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which heightened penalties for threats, violence, and obstruction of people entering facilities, radically undercut the clinic blockade movement when Congress passed it in 1994. So did the conviction of high-profile murder defendants like Michael Griffin and Paul Hill. The clinic blockade movement was consumed by internal divides, with multiple organizations even claiming the name Operation Rescue. Anti-abortion leaders mostly focused on change through the courts and politics.

Now that Roe is gone, the movement is at an inflection point. Personhood has become the movement’s new North Star. And while success in the federal courts isn’t imminent, there is now no reason a state couldn’t enforce any vision of personhood. That means that conservatives have to decide what they mean by enforcing the rights of the unborn. This bill is a sign that even punishing women doesn’t strike some as harsh enough.

This bill won’t pass. For starters, North Carolina is not the most likely state to pass any abortion abolitionist bill; at the moment, it doesn’t even ban abortion from the moment of fertilization. And no state has yet passed any kind of abolitionist proposal, much less one allowing people to gun one another down in the name of protecting life.

But this bill has a different resonance now that Donald Trump has pledged not to enforce the FACE Act in the abortion context except in the most extreme circumstances. It is also a reminder of how the Overton window on personhood is shifting. Abolitionists who call for the punishment of women are gaining influence in state legislatures and movement debates. They have developed their own incremental approach: In South Carolina, for example, Richard Cash, a powerful lawmaker, tried this session to advance a bill punishing women for abortion, but only for a misdemeanor, rather than a felony. The bill became the second abolitionist proposal to pass through a committee this spring before time ran out to pass it this session.

Leading anti-abortion groups still speak out against abolitionists, but their strategy is clear: normalizing the idea of punishing women. The more extreme proposals conservatives advance, the more previously unthinkable ideas become politically realistic.