Almost as quick as the Trump-Vance administration kicked off, anti-abortion leaders and groups showed themselves more emboldened than ever to say what we’ve known all along: that they are not only willing, but dedicated to punishing those who provide, support, and have abortions.

In a YouTube “debate” from January 2025, Lila Rose, founder and president of the anti-abortion group Live Action, said, “[Abortion] should be treated like murder […] There should be penalties for people that kill other people.” This was far from shocking for Rose, whose organization has platformed pro-criminalization opinions consistently for over a decade. In 2011, Live Action published an article calling for Planned Parenthood to be prosecuted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, typically reserved for organized crime. In 2012, Live Action produced an article referring to abortion as a “cruel and bloody power that has been wrongly given to [those who have abortions] by the law.” In 2015, a Live Action article referred to abortion as “legally permissible murder;” in 2018, an article about self-managed abortion claimed that “the blame should be placed solely at the feet of the people who enable the killing to keep happening;” and in a 2020 article titled “Should Being a Woman Allow You to Escape Prosecution for Infanticide?,” a Live Action staff writer asserted that “infanticide and abortion are the same in essence […] For consistency, both should be made illegal.”

Rose has not hidden behind these articles published by her team or distanced herself from their content. To the contrary: she frequently uses language such as “committing abortion” and refers to abortion as “unconstitutional,” an “injustice,” and a “crime,” drawing comparisons between abortion and child abuse, terrorism, armed robbery, sexual assault, and slavery. Yet, even given Rose’s extensive track record on criminalization, she seems to be more willing than ever to explicitly call for the prosecution of those who have abortions. Within the last year, Rose has said that both abortion and abortion pills need to be “outlawed;” that “the Feds should shut the abortion pill crime syndicate down;” and that ”yes, women should be held accountable for killing their offspring.” Even clearer, she posted on X in December 2024: “We need to criminalize abortion.” Her disturbing clarity in calling for criminalization in recent months signifies a broader shift among anti-abortion leaders.

One of the most notable anti-abortion leaders who appears to have publicly shifted into a more explicitly pro-criminalization stance is Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America. In previous years, Hawkins has maintained that she does not support punishing those who have abortions, and both Hawkins and her organization have claimed in the past that their official stance is that people who have abortions have not, should not, and will not be prosecuted. In 2022, Hawkins even co-authored an article with Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (SBA-PLA), titled, “We’re Two Pro-Life Women Who Say ‘No’ to Prosecuting Women for Abortions.” As recently as 2024, Hawkins signed onto a letter by SBA-PLA calling on North Dakota’s Republican Party not to advance a resolution that “supports charging women as ‘co-conspirators’ in their own abortions,” because “turning those women intro criminals is not the way […].”

When Hawkins and Rose appeared together on the Whatever podcast in 2023, Rose said that “if you’re willfully and intentionally taking the life of your child, there should be criminal penalties,” but Hawkins said, “I believe those who commit murder, so the abortionist, those who would be assisting in the abortion, could be tried with a crime. Actually, we’ve written laws at Students for Life of America that do make committing abortion a criminal offense. We do not believe that a woman should go to jail from abortion.”

This history makes it all the more noteworthy that Hawkins made a major platform shift in February of this year by telling her podcast audience that her “school of thought” is to “prosecute abortionists now and perhaps women later, after culture and laws are changed.” She went on to say that this approach “makes the most logical sense” because “it allows us to move the ball forward in good faith; to save as many lives as we can right now while working to change culture, elect actual political leaders who will agree with us, who will be courageous.” This shores up what abortion advocates have long suspected: Hawkins’ apparent anti-criminalization calls throughout her career ought not be taken at face value. Like Rose, Hawkins has consistently signaled a pro-criminalization bent by using phrases such as “abolish abortion,” “abortion is a crime,” and “make abortion illegal.”

Hawkins and Students for Life of America have championed legislation that would punish abortion providers at the state and federal level. In 2023, Hawkins signed onto a letter threatening Walgreens and CVS with “potential criminal legal consequences” for dispensing abortion pills. In 2024, Students for Life of America led an effort to sue the state of Illinois for requiring insurance to cover abortion care, which they claimed violated the federal Comstock Act. Part of their complaint argued that, because of the Comstock Act, abortion providers commit “criminal acts” by receiving “abortion-inducing drugs or abortion-related equipment through the mail” and accused the Biden administration of “refusing to prosecute abortion providers for these crimes.” Hawkins (as well as Rose) was also notably not a signatory of a 2022 letter by the National Right to Life Committee that “state[s] unequivocally that we do not support any measure seeking to criminalize or punish women […].”

The anti-abortion movement has historically obscured and soft-sold their ultimate end goal: the full, federal criminalization of abortion. Despite ongoing claims by so-called “abortion abolitionists” that Lila Rose and Kristan Hawkins are not committed to the criminalization of abortion, both have worked toward enacting laws and policies that facilitate the prosecution of abortion. A growing number of groups—including Students for Life of America and Live Action—have recently and expressly made enshrining legal protections for embryos and fetuses under the 14th Amendment a major policy priority, which many repro legal scholars argue will pave the way for criminal penalties nationwide.

Anti-abortion leaders have only become bolder, but why now? Live Action and Students for Life of America have raked in millions, led meetings in the Oval Office, attended press conferences at the White House, and amassed hundreds of thousands of followers online. We know that criminalization is unpopular, and so do Lila Rose and Kristan Hawkins. It is not a change of heart that Rose and Hawkins are coming out louder than ever in favor of criminalization; rather, it is a newfound confidence in their cause, bolstered by a friendly Trump administration, its allies, and the facades of conservative extremism crumbling all around us. The truth is revealing itself, and it should come as no surprise that punishing people who have abortions is the next box to be ticked off of the anti-abortion agenda.