With Roe gone, forced-birthers shift focus to fetal personhood—and punishing those who get abortions

It should be obvious to anyone familiar with the anti-abortion movement in this country that deterrent or even prohibitive laws against people who might want to terminate an unwanted pregnancy were never their ultimate goal. The ultimate goal has always been punishment, and their justification is fairly simple: Anyone who terminates a pregnancy—for whatever reason—is committing a mortal sin, and is thus deserving of the harshest retribution. As so-called white “evangelical Christians” or “conservative Catholics,” or whatever it is they happen to call themselves, abortion opponents see it as their God-appointed duty to mete out that punishment.

As reported in July by Elizabeth Dias, writing for The New York Times:

About one in three American adults believe that, if abortion is illegal, women who have the procedure should serve jail time or pay a fine or do community service, according to a Pew Research Center study conducted in March. Men, white evangelicals and Republicans are among the most likely to believe that a woman should be punished, the study found.

They reflect an undercurrent of the anti-abortion movement that Donald J. Trump elevated in 2016, when he said that women who receive abortions should receive “some form of punishment” if the procedure were banned in the United States, before bipartisan outrage pushed him to recant.

The fact that so many of these forced-birthers—Donald Trump included—appear to take actual pleasure in the suffering they hope to inflict on others also helps to explain why they won’t stop with simple deterrence.