Earlier this month, Kristan Hawkins, the head of the influential anti-abortion group Students for Life, told her 85,000 followers on X that a particularly militant faction of anti-abortion activists worried her more than pro-choice protesters. “The sad thing is the people I fear getting shot by, most of the time, aren’t crazy Leftists (most of them don’t have guns or how to use them, lol)…but ‘abolitionists,’” she posted. “Think about that.” The post appeared to be in response to allegations that Hawkins and other pro-life leaders had thwarted a recent bill in North Dakota that would have criminalized abortion.
Those accusations came from the group that Hawkins mentioned in her tweet: “Abolitionists,” or activists who believe that abortion should be completely illegal, with no exceptions. Since the Supreme Court ended federal protection for abortion access with its Dobbs decision in 2022, abolitionists have been pushing to criminalize abortion, with some of the most zealous arguing that the termination of a pregnancy should be considered a homicide and punished with the full force of the law.
Like their more mainstream pro-life counterparts, abolitionists often protest outside of abortion clinics—but abolitionists also target other protesters who theoretically are on the same side. They reason that the pro-life protesters are not sufficiently dedicated to eradicating abortion. “History will look back on ‘defund Planned Parenthood’ as the weakest demand in the face of a holocaust ever to exist,” reads one recent Instagram post from Abolitionists Rising, a group with 48,000 followers. Some abolitionists have used violent rhetoric to advance their cause. NBC reported last year that in a 2023 speech, abolitionist leader Jason Storms said, “Guns collecting dust on the shelves are not helping us.” Instead, he called for “peace through superior firepower.”
A group of extremists, many of whom were motivated by fervent religious convictions, abolitionists were once considered a fringe element in the anti-abortion movement, even doing more harm than good by attacking the very women that the anti-abortion movement claimed to want to protect. In 2022, the New York Times referred to abortion abolitionists as “the outer edge of the anti-abortion movement.” Yet Hawkins’ tweet drew immediate blowback—and not just from the handful of explicitly abolition-focused anti-abortion groups. The outcry reflects a developing trend that Cynthia Soohoo, co-director of the Human Rights and Gender Justice Clinic at the City University of New York School of Law, has observed over the past several years.
“Emboldened by Dobbs and their own rhetoric, abortion abolitionists now are pushing for laws based on their extremist, minority position that prenatal life should be treated as people.”
“Emboldened by Dobbs and their own rhetoric, abortion abolitionists now are pushing for laws based on their extremist, minority position that prenatal life should be treated as people,” she wrote in an email to Mother Jones. This concept, called fetal personhood, is gaining traction in the anti-abortion movement. Increasingly, Soohoo said, these abolitionist crusaders are winning the sympathy of pro-life lawmakers who, in turn, are proposing laws asserting that “abortion should be treated like homicide, with no exceptions and severe criminal penalties, and IVF should be banned.”
Over the last few years, several prominent and more mainstream supporters of the pro-life movement have embraced abolitionist rhetoric. In a 2023 episode of her podcast, “Relatable,” the conservative influencer Allie Beth Stuckey, hosted Foundation to Abolish Abortion head Bradley Pierce, who argued that abortion should be considered murder. When Stuckey asked him whether he thought the death penalty should be considered for women who have abortions, he responded, “I think it should be on the table as something for the jury to consider.” The episode, called “Is the Pro-Life Movement Fake?” racked up 44,000 views on YouTube. Lila Rose, who leads the anti-abortion group LiveAction, says she is pro-life, not abolitionist. Yet she declared on X last month to her 383,000 followers, “The pro-life movement will not settle for less than the abolition of abortion.”
One group that has been particularly vocal about their disdain for Hawkins was the TheoBros, a network of young, extremely online men who proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. For the TheoBros, Hawkins’ post was not only insufficiently pro-life, it was also evidence of one of their long-held and frequently discussed beliefs: Women should not hold leadership positions or opine on political and social issues. “This is wicked slander against abolitionists,” posted TheoBro podcaster and Texas pastor Joel Webbon. “Remove this woman from public service.” In a subsequent post, he added, “Abortion will not end until feminism is utterly despised.” Another TheoBro, former Daily Wire reporter Ben Zeisloft, wrote, “She is a feminist. As you know, feminism is the main reason why abortion exists and persists. We need Christian men leading the fight against abortion, not feminist women.”
Charles Haywood, a shampoo magnate-turned-TheoBro who runs a shadowy network called the Society for American Civic Renewal posted, “Abortion will go away when it is aggressively criminalized and results in social ostracism. That’s how men can ‘protect women and children’—by punishing the women who try to get abortions.” Smash Baals, an anonymous TheoBro X account with 67,000 followers, posted, “If women couldn’t vote abortion would’ve never been legalized.”
For Erin Matson, CEO of the reproductive rights group Reproaction, the TheoBros’ reactions are part of a broader backlash against women in leadership roles in the anti-abortion movement. “There was this strategic effort to put more women at the front of these groups,” she said, “and there are men who want to get away from that because they see this as rightfully their turf.” In a since-deleted post on X one of Hawkins’ critics wrote, “While she’s busy jet-setting and cos-playing as a baby-saving warrior, her husband is stuck at home playing both mom and dad.” In response, Hawkins wrote, “No civil conversation to be had with an asshole who posts this about me on their X.”
Activists and influencers are not the only champions of the abolitionist cause. Last year, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, one of the main architects of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 conservative policy roadmap, said during a hidden-camera interview aired on CNN that he didn’t “believe in” allowing abortions for pregnancies that resulted from rape or incest, or even for those that were necessary to save the life of the mother. As my colleague Sarah Szilagy has noted, Vice President JD Vance has advocated using medical records to investigate women who travel out of state to seek abortions.
The most effective arenas for abortion abolitionists are at the state level, where in at least 17 states they have worked with lawmakers to introduce bills that would treat abortion as homicide, according to the extremism watchdog group Political Research Associates. In 2023, the Colorado Times Recorder reported that abolitionist groups were urging their supporters to run for local office. “You need one of them to carry this [abortion abolition resolution] because they’ve got to introduce it, or you can run for that and become part of your County Republican executive committee,” Foundation to Abolish Abortion’s Pierce said at a 2023 rally in Kansas. Later that year, former Colorado State Rep. Dave Williams, who sponsored an abortion abolition bill, ran for and won the role of Colorado Republican Chair. Other prominent abolitionist legislators include state senators Rep. Dusty Deevers (R-OK), David Eastman (R-AK), and Emory Dunahoo (R-GA). In 2024, the Republican Party of Texas listed “Abolish abortion in Texas” as one of its legislative priorities. Some states have moved to resurrect “Zombie laws” that criminalize abortion; the Wisconsin state Supreme Court is in the process of deliberating over one such law from 1849.
As for President Trump, his record on abortion abolition is mixed. In 2016, he said he thought there should be “some sort of punishment” for women who have abortions, though he later backtracked and suggested the doctor performing the procedure was the one who should suffer. Last week, Trump drew strong criticism from abortion abolitionists when he vowed to protect access to IVF. Because the procedure often results in extra embryos that are ultimately discarded, most anti-abortion activists oppose it, but abolitionists for whom the embryo is still a “person” are especially against it. Wednesday on X, Abolitionists Rising called IVF “demonic,” saying “it must be abolished, not regulated.” White nationalist activist Nick Fuentes said in a livestream on Wednesday to his 126,000 followers on Rumble that although he himself was conceived through IVF, he believes that his parents committed a “great mortal sin.”
Meanwhile, Students for Life’s Hawkins has taken a comparatively moderate stance. “Shouldn’t a logical step for the Trump Administration be to regulate [IVF], at a minimum?” she asked on X. (IVF is already regulated in the United States.)
This tactic—adopting a more moderate position in order to seem reasonable by comparison—could be interpreted as similar to the one that Hawkins used in her abolition tweet. Reproaction’s Matson explained that by portraying abolitionists as radicals, Hawkins casts her “extreme position as somehow less extreme.” The criminalization of abortion remains broadly unpopular—just 16 percent of those surveyed in a Marist poll last year said they thought authorities should take legal action against women who have abortions. That’s likely why, in his hidden camera CNN interview, Project 2025 architect Russell Vought endorsed abortion criminalization. “I want to get to abolition,” he explained, “but [we’ve] also got to win elections.” Hawkins appears to be taking a different tack. The abolitionist pile-on against her on social media may have made it seem to outsiders that Hawkins was getting canceled, Matson said, but it “actually plays right into her hand.”
Indeed, in a February 17 post on X, Hawkins explained that very strategy to her followers. “Remember this…successful & large social movements often develop a ‘right-wing’ of extremists,” she wrote. She noted as examples the Black Panthers of the civil rights movement, eco-terrorists in the environmental movement, and “‘abolitionists’ like John Brown” in the anti-slavery movement. “We aren’t fighting for our mere existence and free speech right (which would have been the case if Kamala Harris had won in November),” she wrote. “It means that our movement is moving forward and has great opportunities in the coming months.”
