Bills to Prosecute Abortion Patients for Homicide Jumped 367% in Two Years

THE QUICK & DIRTY

New Report Identifies Anti-Abortion Legislative Trends: Thanks to Pregnancy Justice for this necessary (if a bit scary) report

This Year’s Back to School Essential?: On-campus abortion access

AED on the Pink Pill Pipeline: Listen to me talk birth control disinfo on a podcast!

In the Courts: California is fighting ‘abortion reversal’ claims

What You Need to Know About Flock Cameras and Abortion Surveillance: The Wisconsin cop trying to see if his partner went to an abortion clinic

Quick Call to Action: From Ms. magazine and advocates in a recent pregnancy criminalization case

730. According to a new report by Pregnancy Justice, that’s how many state bills were introduced impacting fetal personhood—a mix of legislation to endanger pregnant people, and protect them.

The stat that stopped us in our tracks: bills to prosecute abortion patients for homicide jumped from just three in the 2023-2024 legislative session to 14 in 2026. That’s a 367% increase! The report warns:

“Though… anti-abortion legislators remain divided on whether pregnant people should be criminalized, the so-called ‘abortion abolitionist’ movement is gaining momentum.”

Frighteningly, we know this warning is all too real: in recent months, once-fringe ‘abolition’ groups have collaborated with top anti-abortion groups and the Texas Republican Party. We’ll have to be especially vigilant of this trend going into the 2026-2027 session.

The good news: Pregnancy Justice also identified 10 bills that would proactively protect pregnant people from prosecution—including in states like Nebraska, Tennessee, and Kentucky. And in Maryland, legislators introduced a bill to prohibit the use of the “lung float test,” a widely discredited and dated forensic method to determine whether someone experienced a live birth or stillbirth. (Use of the lung float test has justified criminal charges against numerous women over their pregnancy outcomes in recent years.)

On IVF, the report flags bills in South Dakota and Oklahoma that would impose reporting requirements to track embryos created, implanted, and destroyed—and tally how many live births resulted from this. It’s alarming to think of the state keeping tabs on this data—and the potential threat to both providers and individuals trying to have children.

And at a time when top anti-abortion groups claim IVF ‘kills more babies than abortion’, it should come as no surprise that seven bills included fetal personhood language that could jeopardize IVF. One of these dangerous bills is a Kansas proposal to classify “the destruction of a fertilized embryo” as a felony.

Pregnancy Justice warns that anti-abortion lawmakers are getting increasingly “creative” in their tactics—including couching their extreme proposals in feigned environmental concerns. (Like we’ve seen with bogus “abortion in the water” bills.) And, of course, there’s the anti-abortion movement’s tried-and-true strategy to expand the Overton window, “deliberately introducing extreme bills, and when those stall, introducing incrementally less extreme versions until one finds traction.”

As college students across the country return to campus this month, there’s some good news: more states than ever have enacted laws requiring public colleges and universities to provide medication abortion in campus health centers. This is crucial, as few students are readily able to travel long distances to clinics to access the medication.

This year, Colorado became the fifth state to enact legislation requiring this. Four other states currently have similar laws: Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, and California. California, specifically, could soon outdo itself, as the state weighs new legislation to provide medication abortion at community colleges. Jessica wrote about that bill this week.

In no small part, we have local abortion funds in the aforementioned states to thank for championing these bills and collaborating with student and youth organizers to get abortion pills on campus. If you’re able, don’t forget to show those funds—Cobalt Action Fund in Colorado, ACCESS Reproductive Justice and Reprocare in California, and Chicago Abortion Fund in Illinois—some love. And for more on the vital work of young, feminist organizers:

Speaking of young, feminist organizers: for all the amazing work young women are doing to fight for reproductive rights, conservatives are hard at work trying to radicalize them in the opposite direction through what’s known as the pink pill pipeline. We’ve covered this trend at length at Abortion, Every Day—including the way it inundates young social media users with seemingly apolitical, female lifestyle content while pushing disinformation about birth control.

I had the chance to talk about all of this and AED’s reporting on this issue on the Close All Tabs podcast at KQED. You can listen to the episode here:

A California court is currently weighing a case about whether anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers have free rein to lie to pregnant people—specifically, about an unproven, unsafe regimen to ‘reverse’ a medication abortion. This is called “abortion pill reversal” (APR).

Three years ago, California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta sued Heartbeat International and RealOptions Inc. for pushing APR, and putting pregnant people’s health and safety at serious risk. Now, after over a month of testimony in Alameda County Superior Court, California and Heartbeat International, represented by Thomas More Society, have finished presenting evidence. Closing arguments are set for September 17, and the court will have to issue a ruling within 90 days.

The suit has broad implications at a time when the anti-abortion movement is throwing everything at the wall to shield CPCs from any amount of state regulation. The Supreme Court just ruled in their favor in a case in New Jersey earlier this year, and states across the country are passing legislation to ban any state regulation of CPCs—despite how much they receive in taxpayer dollars.

This case also falls within a broader trend of ‘free speech’ suits from anti-abortion activists—like clinic harassers who say they have a First Amendment right to harass abortion patients up close and personal.

Even though we’ll be waiting a while for the ruling in this California case, there’s good news: Bonta seems optimistic. He issued a statement last week, saying the state is
“confident in the strength of our case” and that they “look forward to the court’s decision.”

Meanwhile, anti-abortion groups have spent the last several weeks claiming that Bonta is targeting ‘women’s right to choose abortion pill reversal.’ We wrote all about this eyeroll-inducing strategy earlier this week, here.

Earlier this week, Jessica flagged a chilling tidbit in a recent Washington Post article about “rogue” police officers who are taking advantage of access to Flock’s automatic license plate readers to stalk their partners:

“In Wisconsin, a police officer allegedly used Flock to check whether his ex-girlfriend had gone to an abortion clinic, according to a police affidavit for a case set for trial this month.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because last year, we learned that Texas police tried to track down an abortion patient using an automatic license plate reader (ALPR), accessing more than 83,000 cameras across the country. Months after that initial reporting, we learned that police were trying to locate this woman with the goal of prosecuting her.

The Texas case only reached the cops in the first place because the woman’s abusive partner tipped off police. That same man was later convicted for assaulting her. Plus—the sheriff overseeing the whole investigation involving the 83,000 cameras himself was later arrested and indicted on multiple counts of sexual harassment!

AED spoke to Farah Diaz-Tello, the senior counsel and legal director of If/When/How, about the implications of stories like that in Wisconsin and Texas. Diaz-Tello says that new tools like Flock mean that state surveillance is “accelerating and expanding.” She says, “Technologies like Flock cameras give cops a level of power to surveil that is any abuser’s dream,”

“Given that an estimated 20-40% of law enforcement families experience violence at the hands of a police officer, it should be no surprise that cops who are abusers use the technology to track their victim’s movements.

Abusers will use anything they can, including Ring cameras, GPS trackers, and spyware apps, to terrorize their victims, and abuse the legal system to harass and control them.”

Has access to reproductive care or education changed your life? This includes: contraception, sex education, maternal care, assisted reproduction, miscarriage care, or, of course, abortion. The answer is probably yes! At a time when these are all increasingly under attack and shrouded in torrents of stigmatizing disinformation, storytelling has become more vital than ever.

If you have a story, Ms. magazine wants to hear it, as part of the feminist publication’s Majority Campaign project, in collaboration with Center for Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Freedom for All. Find the stories that have already been submitted and, if you’d like, share your own, here.