The Abortion Abolition Movement: Membership, Beliefs, and Practices

• In Event: Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 12: The Intersection of Law and Movements

Abstract

This paper examines the contemporary “abortion abolitionist” movement in the United States. In recent years, abortion abolitionists have actively sought to demarcate themselves from the broader anti-abortion or “pro-life” movement (Mason, 2025; Ziegler, 2025). Rooted in a Calvinistic and Christian Reconstructionist theology, abortion abolitionists view punishing abortion seekers as a requirement for the pure and consistent application of biblical law on earth and advocate for punishments up to and including capital punishment. The 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has galvanized the abortion abolitionist movement, catalyzing a wave of increasingly restrictive legislative efforts at both the state and national levels. Between 2022 and 2025, at least 42 explicitly “abortion abolitionist” bills were introduced by GOP lawmakers, reflecting a strategic push to further erode the rights of pregnant people and expand criminalization in the post-Dobbs legal landscape. By strategically appropriating the emancipatory language authority of anti-slavery abolition, activists engage in concept capture (HoSang & Lowndes, 2019), co-opting historically progressive justice language to legitimate a project centered on patriarchal moral governance.

Legal scholars Rachel Rebouché and Mary Ziegler (2023) have argued that these “once fringe players” (p. 33) have developed model legislation in several states that could eventually make the criminalization of abortion possible. Despite its increasing visibility and political activity, there are few existing social science studies examining abortion abolitionists. This project analyzes the movement’s structure, ideology, and mobilization, focusing on both organizational dynamics and individual activists, the role of gender in shaping participation, and the centrality of punitive measures within its broader political vision. In doing so, it considers how abortion abolitionists construct a moral economy of abortion, an affective and value-laden system in which ideas about human life, gender, and justice are exchanged and mobilized toward punitive ends.

Author

• Robin O’Hanlon, CUNY-Graduate Center