Male anti-abortion religious leaders mull murder charges for pregnant people at national event
An all-male panel of anti-abortion religious leaders from around the country met last week to discuss the strategies that should be used to end abortion in every state at any stage of pregnancy, without exceptions for rape and incest, and with criminal punishment for the pregnant person in line with existing criminal penalties for murder, which includes the death penalty.
The panel was part of a week-long series of events hosted by Operation Save America, an anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ and anti-Muslim religious group that wants all Americans to follow “God’s law” and their interpretation of the Christian gospel. Many of the events were held in Douglasville, Georgia, at Pray’s Mill Baptist Church, which broke away from the Southern Baptist Convention for supposed acceptance of liberal social justice views regarding race and gender. For part of the week, the group started its mornings by protesting outside of A Preferred Women’s Health Center, an abortion clinic near Atlanta.
Friday’s speakers included Wisconsin-based Operation Save America Director Jason Storms and former OSA director Rusty Thomas, along with Arizona-based End Abortion Now communications director Zachary Conover, Georgia Right to Life President Ricardo Davis, and Gabriel Rench, a member of the extremist Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho.
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The panel focused on legislation they call “equal protection” bills, such as Georgia’s House Bill 496, also called the Georgia Prenatal Equal Protection Act, which was introduced in February but did not advance in the state’s House of Representatives. An “equal protection” bill, by their definition, is one that adds criminal penalties to a pregnant person for the intentional termination of a pregnancy at any stage, with no exceptions for rape or incest. The law would make an exception if the abortion was performed to prevent the pregnant person’s “imminent death or great bodily injury.”
Storms said OSA has advocated for similar bills in more than a dozen states, including Alabama, Arizona, Missouri, Kentucky and Oklahoma. So far, no states have passed an “equal protection” bill, but several, including Georgia, did pass what anti-abortion advocates call “heartbeat bills” that ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, before many people know they are pregnant. Those who advocate for “equal protection” bills call themselves “abolitionists,” co-opting language from the movement to abolish slavery, while the “pro-life” community has advocated for more politically expedient bills like six-week bans. Storms and other panelists called the six-week bans weak, even though they expressed understanding of political environments that make “equal protection” bills unlikely to become reality.
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Conover’s organization, End Abortion Now, creates model legislation that grants legal personhood to fertilized eggs, which would limit in-vitro fertilization procedures, and assigns penalties to people who have abortions in addition to doctors who provide them. Some of his legislative efforts have been defeated by organizations that are against criminal penalties for pregnant people.