From their own mouth

The letter states the overall goals of the Pro-Life Movement:

“As national and state pro-life organizations, representing tens of millions of pro-life men, women, and children across the country, let us be clear: We state unequivocally that we do not support any measure seeking to criminalize or punish women and we stand firmly opposed to include such penalties in legislation.”

At first glance this phrase might not seem problematic, but it is for several key reasons. First, HB813 never said anything about women. HB813 merely sought to criminalize the act of abortion under existing homicide law. No new law or penalties were being introduced. Second, we cannot abolish abortion if we also give some of the principal actors – the mothers – immunity under the law to commit prenatal murder, especially when the majority of abortions are being done by the women themselves. And yet that’s the reality we’ve had since before Roe v. Wade.

In fact, it’s because Texas didn’t treat abortion as murder that the Roe case emerged in the first place. Justice Blackmun noted this legal discrepancy in Texas homicide law when writing the majority opinion on the Roe case:

“When Texas urges that a fetus is entitled to Fourteenth Amendment protection as a person, it faces a dilemma. Neither in Texas nor in any other State are all abortions prohibited. Despite broad proscription, an exception always exists.… But if the fetus is a person who is not to be deprived of life without due process of law, and if the mother’s condition is the sole determinant, does not the Texas exception appear to be out of line with the Amendment’s command? …in Texas, the woman is not a principal or an accomplice with respect to an abortion upon her. If the fetus is a person, why is the woman not a principal or an accomplice? Further, the penalty for criminal abortion…is significantly less than the maximum penalty for murder…. If the fetus is a person, may the penalties be different?”

In other words, the Supreme Court ruled against protecting prenatal children because Texas refused to equally protect them under existing homicide law. Instead, Texas insisted that mothers who willfully murder their preborn children should be viewed as innocent before the law, and the doctors who assisted them in murder should only receive a slap on the wrist. This led the Supreme Court to conclude that abortion should continue to be treated as healthcare and not as murder since no state showed any interest in treating it as murder anyway. This means that the very ideology that allowed for Roe v. Wade is the same ideology the Pro-Life Movement thinks will now help end abortion.

Sadly, the Pro-Life Movement has continued this unconstitutional and unbiblical philosophy ever since 1973. The PLM regularly opposes equal justice for prenatal children because it doesn’t want mothers held judicially responsible for murdering them. National Right to Life has held this position from the moment of its founding.

John C. Willke, co-founder of NRL, responded in his book “Abortion: Questions & Answers” to the question on whether women would be punished under a pro-life Constitutional amendment that forbids abortion:

“We don’t know of a single pro-life or pro-abortion leader, or church leader, or congressman, or member of Parliament in any nation, who would want this. The mother is the second victim; she needs help and love – not punishment. No, women would not be punished.”

In a 2023 NPR interview, Carol Tobias, current president of National Right to Life Committee, said that

abortion providers know “exactly what they’re doing” and “if they’re breaking the law, they should be held accountable.” Yet she went on to emphasize, “But we don’t put women in that category.”