A Radical Abortion Push Threatens Pro-Life Progress — And Women Could Pay The Price

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Two Tennessee lawmakers are looking to change the state’s criminal statute to treat abortion as a homicide. This is a misguided effort to punish women who end their pregnancies in a state where abortion is almost entirely banned, and it could endanger both women seeking care for a miscarriage and the crisis pregnancy centers that have stepped in to help women with unplanned pregnancies.

The addendum to Tennessee’s HB 570 is also so poorly written as to be almost inscrutable, casting doubt on whether the two Tennessee legislators, Rep. Jody Barrett of Dickson and Rep. Mark Pody of Lebanon, even authored the bill with Tennesseans in mind. Abortion is all but banned in Tennessee under a trigger law that went into effect immediately after the Supreme Court’s landmark Dobbs ruling sent the regulation of abortion back to the states. The two almost certainly didn’t consider the needs of women or the goals of the pro-life movement at large.

So-called “abortion abolitionist” bills are not new. Earlier this year, National Right to Life joined forces with unlikely allies, the ACLU and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, to defeat a nearly identical measure in South Dakota. Support for legislation such as the Tennessee amendment has festered recently in the same recesses of social media where men debate the utility of the 19th Amendment as a means to ensure women feel the fullest extent of possible punishment for their moral transgressions.

But while this sort of terminally online version of conservative politics captures clicks and the attention of paranoid leftists, it often fails to consider the real-world implications of its policies. The 19th Amendment, of course, prohibits discrimination in voting based on sex, not specifically the female sex, meaning if it were up for true debate, women, who make up the majority of reliable American voters, could just as easily disenfranchise men. 

The “abortion abolition” bills, similarly, would directly and negatively affect the very pro-life organizations that support women facing unintended pregnancies and put pro-life organizations in the untenable position of preaching compassion to pregnant women in a land of punishment — after years of work ensuring that Tennessee protects not only the most vulnerable among us, but also the women whose lives and futures are in the balance.

The Tennessee law is so unbelievably vague that it even puts the very people pro-lifers have always sought to protect — people like me who lived through the agonizing reality of a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy — at risk of being investigated, charged, or tried if they run across an authority who is confused or even vindictive.

In December 2022, right after the Tennessee trigger law went into effect, I ended up in the emergency room in downtown Nashville. What I’d thought was a case of food poisoning turned out to be my worst nightmare: My pregnancy, which I’d been overjoyed to learn about just a few short weeks before, was ectopic. My fallopian tube was either strained or had ruptured, and I was bleeding out. The hospital called a Catholic priest to give me last rites, just in case I didn’t make it out of emergency surgery. 

I survived. My child, then just shy of 12 weeks, did not. 

It was not my choice, and it was not by any definition, even the strictest interpretation of the Catholic faith to which I fervently ascribe, an abortion. But in the months-long haze that followed, I considered the “what ifs.” The trigger law in Tennessee, written decades ago, was vague, and while I’d gotten swift and competent care, the law left open the possibility that other doctors in lower-level trauma hospitals outside of a big city or unattached to a major university might not be willing to risk what could, in some people’s minds, be an abortion procedure.

It was a rare point on which the state’s pro-life and pro-choice organizations agreed: We could not let confusion endanger women. Tennessee’s law needed to be clearer and more specific about treating an ectopic pregnancy so that no woman would be denied the care I received. In the worst weeks of my life, I worked with those organizations and the doctors who saved my life to change that language.

Tennessee’s laws now protect both the unborn — the “heartbeat”-style statute proscribes any abortion after about six weeks, once fetal heart tones are detected — and women who need life-saving care. This is a perfect scenario for someone like me, such a hardcore and consistent pro-lifer that I can make both the Left and the Right deeply uncomfortable at cocktail parties.

Enter the “abolitionists.” The provisions of the new Tennessee legislation don’t say the word “murder,” but they theoretically extend the definition of “homicide” to include any taking of a life from the moment of fertilization — a definition so extreme it almost sounds like satire authored by Planned Parenthood’s communications department. It strips legal protections for pregnant women who currently reside in the state and makes an assault on an unborn child the equivalent of an assault on a born-alive one.

Here’s where it gets hairy, though. The bill’s sponsors claim that the bill includes protections for a “spontaneous miscarriage” and for the “unintentional” death of a child during “life-saving procedures,” so long as an adequate effort is made to “save the life of the unborn child.” But the language comes after and in response to the redefinition of “homicide,” meaning that the two scenarios are defenses to alleged crime, not situations where a woman would be excused from scrutiny.

Homicide isn’t the same as murder; it includes intentional, reckless, and negligent killings. Under this law, a woman who goes to a hospital for a miscarriage or an ectopic pregnancy could end up in a file on a prosecutor’s desk, where the state’s legal department — not the woman’s medical team — would be left to determine whether care that ended the life of an unborn child was actually needed and whether adequate effort had been made to save the child’s life. In other words, they could be asked to decide what type of homicide each woman had committed and whether that homicide was justified.

The bill also allows for retroactive investigations and prosecutions. 

We already know that confusion over what interventions are legal puts women in danger of not receiving timely care, and that’s why pro-lifers were so adamant that the Tennessee law be clear. While states such as Texas that have similar laws have faced allegations, albeit mostly unsubstantiated, that abortion laws delayed or prevented adequate medical care, Tennessee has not. Given that Tennessee all but outlaws abortion, the only women likely to fall under the government’s scrutiny are women who show up to receive medical care.

The bill’s supporters claim the legislation is actually aimed at women who procure abortion medication through telehealth, but they seem to miss that most of these women, who will have abortions on Tennessee soil, will remain unknown. To curb these “loophole” abortions, abolitionist organizations could push President Donald Trump and the Department of Health and Human Services to impose stricter health and safety restrictions on drugs such as mifepristone and limit doctors’ ability to prescribe it for off-label uses.

Abolitionists, though, have hamstrung those authentically pro-life efforts, as well as efforts to get heartbeat laws passed in new states, standing in the way of any pro-life legislation that does not specifically punish women. This is not simply a side effect of their work; keeping pro-life legislation off the books is a feature for them, not a bug.

These laws, quite simply, make the job of pro-lifers much harder. For years, only the Left worked against us in the legislature and the judiciary. Now, leading pro-life organizations, working to pass pro-life laws that limit access to abortion, face the opposition of abolitionists. And pro-life organizations doing the truly hard work — counseling and serving the women who are faced with unplanned pregnancies — now must publicly reckon with a movement that is everything we have, for years, adamantly denied we are not: cruel, cold, and motivated by desire to punish women.

The argument is, of course, that these women are cold-blooded killers, not victims, and should receive punishment in kind. But we know, from decades of work in the pro-life movement, that abortions are often coerced, directly and indirectly, and that mothers who find themselves considering abortion outside of coercion often have complex motivations. Life isn’t what you see on radical feminist TikTok; while some women could find joy in destruction, they are certainly not the majority. Pro-lifers have dedicated themselves to meeting women where they are — in desperation, in poverty, at critical junctions, in fear, and in danger — and to treating each woman as a human, worthy of dignity and care.

That message simply can’t coexist with a “pro-life” message that takes perverse joy in punishing women at their most vulnerable.

The law in Tennessee is unlikely to pass. But rest assured, the abolitionist movement is not dead. And pro-lifers should be prepared to defend what has made us successful: our commitment to both the unborn and the women who carry them.

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Emily Zanotti is a Catholic writer, humorist, and professional chicken tender living in Nashville, Tennessee.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.