A Texas Movement to Punish Women for Abortion Is Gaining Power

The morning the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, the first reaction of self-styled “abortion abolitionist” Bradley Pierce was to mourn. The 41-year-old lawyer from Liberty Hill would later allow himself to celebrate, but first he thought of the 63 million unborn children he believed had been slain since the 1973 decision. “I just said to God, ‘God forgive us for what we have done and what we have allowed for nearly fifty years in this country.’ ”

For many who oppose abortion rights, the high court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization represented the culmination of five decades of crusading. Senator Ted Cruz called the ruling “nothing short of a massive victory for life.” Donald Trump took credit, bragging about the right-wing justices he had appointed. Leading opponents of abortion rights had long described overturning Roe, which affirmed a constitutional right to an abortion, as their ultimate goal, the boss battle after which the credits would roll. But Pierce’s celebration was muted. He saw the end of Roe as just the beginning of a new stage in the struggle. What he sought, as he argued in an amicus brief, was nothing less than the total abolition of abortion. 

He instructed the court to “submit itself to God and His law” by declaring the “preborn” to be “persons” under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The justices, he wrote, could finally fix a fatal defect in Roe by recognizing that state laws against murder must also apply to “persons not yet born.” The Supreme Court declined to do so—but Texas may provide more fertile ground for Pierce’s mission. 

In the two years since Dobbs, Pierce and his ilk have preached a radical message. Abortion may be illegal—with very few exceptions—in fourteen states, including Texas, but this hasn’t stopped women from traveling for the procedure or from acquiring abortion-inducing pills through the mail, from out of state. “Roe v. Wade is dead, but abortion is alive and well, and babies are still dying in our country,” Pierce declared recently to a group of Baptist leaders. “Mothers themselves are becoming—in the tens of thousands—the abortionists,” he later said on a podcast. He and his cohort propose an extreme next step: remove exceptions in state penal codes so women can be charged with murder, an offense that in Texas carries the possibility of life in prison or even the death penalty. 

The president of Abolish Abortion Texas, a male-dominated, Christian nonprofit, Pierce is perhaps the most prominent leader in Texas of abortion abolitionists, whose quarrels with established groups that oppose abortion rights have become increasingly acute. Founded in 2016, AATX has become harder to ignore. During this year’s primaries, 33 Republican candidates for the Texas House signed the group’s pledge to abolish abortion. Of those, eight defeated Republican incumbents and a dozen will almost certainly serve in the Legislature in 2025. And thanks to AATX’s efforts, the official position of the Texas GOP is to “abolish abortion” by giving rights to “all preborn children from the moment of fertilization.” Through another organization, the Foundation to Abolish Abortion, Pierce has written legislation for far-right state legislators across the country.

During his frequent appearances in front of Republican groups, Pierce presents as a clean-cut lawyer, wearing a suit and tie. With a law degree from Baylor University and a keen recall of Scripture, he is as apt to reach for a Bible verse as he is a legal citation—an Old Testament prophet meets logic guy. Despite the packaging, his views position him well outside the mainstream movement to outlaw abortion. The father of eleven homeschooled kids—“a football team,” he jokes—Pierce calls surrogacy an “evil” method used by “sodomites” to bring forth children. He claims there is no ethical way to perform in vitro fertilization procedures, and that his favored legislation would “make IVF extremely difficult.” Before Roe was overturned, he urged state legislatures to simply defy the high court and enforce state-level abortion bans. He proclaims all embryos and fetuses to be “fatherless” because a “father has zero legal right to do anything to prevent that child from being killed” by its mother. But what most sets him and other abortion abolitionists apart from their more mainstream counterparts is their agitation for criminalizing the procedure. 

At a June event in Leander, an Austin suburb, hosted by influential far-right group the True Texas Project, Pierce laid siege to a seeming contradiction in “pro-life” ideology. If life begins at conception and abortion is homicide, then why aren’t those who get abortions held accountable for their crimes? “It’s now legal to murder your child up to the moment of birth, as long as you’re the mother doing it,” Pierce told the small crowd. “We believe that murdering anyone should be illegal for everyone. It’s that simple.” 

Pierce’s antagonists on the right vehemently reject this thinking.“We don’t think women in unplanned pregnancies want to have abortions,” said Joe Pojman, the executive director of the Texas Alliance for Life, a group with strong ties to the GOP establishment. “They have abortions because they typically see no alternative that is reasonable in their view.” He argues that programs funding crisis pregnancy centers, such as Texas’s $143 million Thriving Texas Families Program, will lead to women making different choices. But abolitionists reject what they view as a victimhood narrative. “The pro-life movement treats all women as infants . . . and that’s insulting,” Pierce told the Baptist group in 2023. “Here’s what we need to be telling them: Look your sin in the face. Admit to what you’ve done, admit that you’ve murdered your own child.”

David Lowe, an army veteran and the GOP nominee for a state House seat in the Fort Worth area, echoes this view. “It’s a lifestyle choice,” says Lowe, who was endorsed by AATX’s political action committee. “Yes, there are victims, right? Somebody can get raped or incest or whatever and get pregnant, God forbid. . . . But people make up rapes all the time. I’m not saying that it happens most of the time, but are we going to start allowing certain people to kill their child just because they say they were raped?”

Susan Hays, a West Texas attorney who has handled several reproductive rights cases, called the philosophy pervading the state GOP “fundamentalist ideological logic that occurs in a vacuum disconnected from reality.” The reality, she says, is that the state’s near-total abortion ban jeopardizes women’s lives and fertility. Doctors have routinely complained that the exception for the life of the mother isn’t clear, creating the risk of criminal sanctions. Many are terrified to perform abortions, even when a pregnancy isn’t viable and ending it is necessary to protect the mother. “Every pregnancy is a loaded gun pointed at a woman’s head—there’s a lot of chambers in that pistol, but somewhere there’s a bullet,” said Hays, paraphrasing a physician she’d consulted with. “To say ‘abortion abolition’ is to say ‘I’m going to kill some women and girls.’ ” 

Nationally, these are the best of times and the worst of times for opponents of abortion rights. The Dobbs decision has provoked a tremendous backlash. Blue states have strengthened their laws protecting reproductive rights, while voters in traditionally red states, including Kansas and Ohio, have approved ballot initiatives protecting abortion access or struck down ones adding new restrictions. Democratic candidates have won election after election campaigning on the issue. Trump has been flummoxed by the fallout. Under pressure from the former president, the party’s national platform abandoned calls for a coast-to-coast ban, instead advocating for leaving abortion policies to individual states. 

The climate in Texas is quite different. For more than a decade, Republicans here have chipped away at reproductive rights. In 2013 then-Democratic senator Wendy Davis became an overnight star by filibustering legislation designed to shutter abortion clinics but lost her 2014 bid for governor by twenty percentage points to Greg Abbott after her opponents tagged her Abortion Barbie. In 2021 the Legislature passed the so-called bounty law, which empowers private citizens to collect a cash reward if they successfully sue someone who “aids or abets” an abortion. No meaningful electoral backlash has followed. The GOP retains control of the Governor’s Mansion and both houses of the Legislature, as it has for two decades. 

AATX isn’t wasting its opportunity. Though small in numbers, the group can count on a cadre of elected officials who express absolute commitment to the cause. For Lowe, legislation allowing criminal prosecution of women is nonnegotiable. “There are very few bills where you could say, ‘I would be willing to give my life to get this passed,’ ” he said in 2022. “I would.”

As Pierce tells it, the abortion abolitionists’ long march through the grass roots of the Texas Republican Party has been met with little resistance. His own convictions were formed in part by his wife’s four miscarriages, which opened his eyes to the humanity of the “preborn.” “Seeing that life lost at such an early age. I mean, that’s a human being right there,” he told a Christian podcast in 2023. AATX’s first goal was to get abortion abolition into the Texas GOP platform as a legislative priority. Pierce figured it would take years to succeed. Instead, the party faithful embraced the cause. “People were super receptive,” Pierce told Love Life, a North Carolina group opposing abortion rights, in 2023. “Most of them were like, ‘Where has this been? This has been what I always believed.’ ” 

Next Pierce wrote legislation for the 2017 legislative session. Endorsed by twelve House Republicans, the bill would have made it possible to charge pregnant Texans who got an abortion with murder. It also would have allowed for the prosecution of pregnant women accused of assaulting their fetuses. “We were able to get a legislator to say, ‘I want to do this bill,’ ” Pierce told Love Life. “Why? Because now it’s the Republican thing to do. Now it’s not like you’re some extremist.”

The legislation didn’t get a hearing. No doubt its author, Representative Tony Tinderholt, of Arlington, didn’t help the cause, telling the Texas Observer that he thought charging women with murder would make them “more personally responsible.” But Governor Greg Abbott seems to have given the abolitionists an opening. According to Pierce and his allies, Abbott promised a dying sixteen-year-old boy—whose father wrote a book called Biblical Strategies to Abolish Abortion—that he would “outlaw abortion altogether in the state of Texas.” (Abbott’s office did not respond to a request for an interview.) In February 2019, at the outset of that year’s legislative session, the abolitionists delivered some 70,000 signatures on a petition demanding that Abbott make good on his word. Two months later an abolition bill got a hearing for the first time. 

Five years on, the abolitionists have yet to get another hearing. One of their main legislative allies, state representative Bryan Slaton, a former minister, was expelled from the Legislature last year after he plied a nineteen-year-old aide with alcohol and had sex with her. But far from being defeated, the abolitionists have reinforced their ranks in the GOP. 

Arguably their biggest victory: replacing state representative Stephanie Klick, whom Pojman calls “one of the top conservative pro-life legislators in the last decade,” with an abolitionist. Klick, a nurse who was first elected in 2012 in a district representing parts of Fort Worth, had overseen the House Public Health committee since 2021. Her committee was a laboratory for some of the most aggressive abortion restrictions in the nation, including the bounty law, a ban on abortion-inducing drugs after seven weeks of pregnancy, and the “trigger” law banning all abortions—no exceptions for rape or incest—that went into effect after the Dobbs decision. 

But her efforts weren’t enough for the abolitionists, who were furious that she didn’t give their bill a hearing in her committee in 2021. That year she drew a Republican opponent: Lowe. Born in Dallas to a woman he describes as a “drug-addicted prostitute,” Lowe was thrust into the foster-care system at an early age. “It’s bad for business to have a baby, but my mother chose life.” Lowe says he discovered the abortion abolitionist cause after deciding to run for office. 

“If I’m trying to portray myself as more conservative than my opponent, then obviously I am going to support the [Texas Republican Party] platform,” Lowe told Texas Monthly. Klick narrowly won a runoff against him in 2022, but he kept campaigning. Klick, he told voters during a second bid in 2024, was a morally compromised tyrant who put politics above the rights of the “preborn.” Klick warned voters that her opponent wanted legislation that would “give the death penalty to women who’ve had an abortion.” It didn’t work. Lowe won in a May runoff by thirteen percentage points.

Does Lowe really want to throw women who have abortions into prison or have them put to death? “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” he told me. “But at the same time, I also believe that the mother is a part of the abortion process, and there should be a punishment of some sort.” I pressed him. Wouldn’t that include the possibility, under Texas law, of life in prison or the death penalty? “There is a possibility that a judge would give a mother a prison sentence, right? Would they give them the death penalty or life in prison? Absolutely not. I don’t see that ever happening.”

The abolitionists appear unlikely to get their way anytime soon. Their political program lacks broad support—according to a 2022 poll by Pew Research Center, only 14 percent of Americans say women should serve jail time if they have an abortion in a situation where it is illegal. “I am sorry that they don’t want to contribute to the greater effort,” says Pojman of his extremist rivals. “But on the other hand, my heart is not broken. Their views are so counterproductive to many decades of solid pro-life progress.” 

Though Pierce and Pojman regard each other as combatants, abortion-rights advocates don’t make such a hard distinction. “The abolitionists are playing from the same playbook” used by their less extreme rivals, says Blake Rocap, the legislative counsel for Avow, a statewide reproductive rights group. Texas Alliance for Life and Texas Right to Life have had great success replacing relatively moderate Republicans with hard-core anti-abortionists. Now the abolitionists are attempting to purge some of those elected officials, deeming them Pharisees. Even if the abolitionists sputter, they force the mainstream groups into an awkward spot. If groups like Pojman’s are “definitely going to draw the line at prosecuting pregnant folks, then what’s next?” Rocap asks. “Unfortunately the grift is over for them. They would need to pack up and go home. But they can’t do that.” 

Instead, Rocap expects the focus to shift. Abortion opponents will pressure authorities to crack down on medication abortions and to make it harder for Texans to travel out of state for the procedure. In doing so, activists will have to get creative and push the boundaries of constitutionality. Blueprints for this approach already exist. Several Texas counties have passed ordinances prohibiting travel on county roads for those seeking an abortion. In 2023 state representative Steve Toth, of The Woodlands, near Houston, introduced constitutionally dubious legislation to make it illegal to “provide information on how to obtain an abortion-inducing drug” or to even create a website on the topic. Pojman says he wants to see prosecutors make use of a 2021 law—another Klick innovation—that he says makes it a crime to transport abortion drugs into or within the state. (Rocap contends that the law only applies within the state of Texas.) 

This turmoil among opponents of abortion rights should be viewed in the larger context of the culture wars. The most hard-core right-wing crusaders believe themselves to be engaged in an existential wrestling match with the left, over issues involving the family, gender roles, and the control of institutions—an earthly fight that ultimately extends, in their view, to a spiritual struggle between good and evil. “If we’re not bringing our civil government under the subjection of Christ, then we are letting it be turned over to the subjection of Satan,” Pierce told the Love Life group. 

The far right envisions a new order—policed by the government—that is patriarchal, hierarchical, explicitly Christian, and centered on fertility. Every person will know their place and be made to accept it. Women will be helpmeets to their husbands and bearers of children. This vision dovetails with GOP vice presidential nominee J. D. Vance’s carping about miserable “childless cat ladies”—an epithet that manages to demean both women and cats. It helps explain why Kevin Roberts, who is the architect of the Trump regime-in-waiting playbook called Project 2025 and got his start at the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation, complains that contraceptive technologies are “revolutionary inventions that shape American culture away from abundance, marriage, and family.”

At the True Texas Project event, I asked Pierce if he ever worries about a backlash. “I think we should keep that in mind,” he said. “But at the end of the day, it comes down to what does God tell us to do? I believe that if we obey God, then we trust the results to him.”  

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Inside the Push to Make Abortion a Criminal Offense.” Subscribe today.