Yes. The historical evidence is well-established. The Declaration of Independence clearly asserts, “All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with the unalienable right to life.” When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, the word “person” had a settled public meaning that included every human being. By that year, thirty of thirty-seven states had enacted anti-abortion statutes, the majority of which classified abortion as an offense against the person and referred to the unborn child as a “child.” Nine ratifying states provided the same range of punishment for killing a preborn child as for killing the mother. The framers of the Amendment chose the phrase “any person” deliberately, not to protect only one race, but to guarantee due process and equal protection to every human being. The same constitutional principle that required the recognition of personhood for enslaved Americans requires its recognition for preborn children. For a thorough treatment of this argument, we highly recommend the work of Joshua J. Craddock, particularly “Protecting Prenatal Persons: Does the Fourteenth Amendment Prohibit Abortion?” (Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, 2017) and “Personhood After Dobbs” (Catholic University Law Review, 2025).

No, we’re protecting children. If it were legal to kill a toddler, we would never consider it accurate to frame legislation protecting toddlers as simply “punishing mothers.” Conversely, we seek to have the law protect all people equally. We lead with protection, not punishment. Criminal law carries penalties. That’s what makes it law. The question is whether preborn children deserve that protection. If they are persons, giving them legal protection is no different than any other homicide law. Equal rights protection does not single out mothers, it makes no mention of any class of person who does the killing. It holds everyone equally accountable: pimps, sex traffickers, boyfriends, husbands, or any outside actor who aids or coerces the killing of a child. Legislation and prosecutorial practice can and should allow for non-retroactivity, duress defenses, and broad prosecutorial discretion. The primary goal is not to punish, but to deter abortions and prevent them from happening in the first place. Many post-abortive women have told us they would not have aborted if the law had been different, that’s evidence the law is life-saving, not only punitive. This framework actually loves women better: if taking mifepristone is as legal as taking Tylenol, pressuring a woman to take it is just persuasion — perfectly legal. When abortion is illegal, that same pressure carries legal weight. This doesn’t just protect preborn children, it protects their mothers from being pressured into killing them.

Coercion in abortion is real, widespread, and grievous. True victims need protection, not prosecution. Any just legal framework must take coercion seriously, accounting for it through available duress defenses and allowing prosecutorial discretion, just as in other criminal cases. This is why Equal Rights Protection is so needed. The law’s ability to meaningfully protect women in these kinds of cases depends on abortion being illegal in the first place. When abortion is legal, pressuring a woman to abort is not a prosecutable offense. This is true even in many current pro-life states, where abortion is illegal only for doctors. As will be seen below in the answer to “Aren’t women victims?” much of pro-life legal doctrine has asserted that a high percentage of post-abortive women were coerced into their abortions. Later clarifying that coercion in this sense refers to “modest interpersonal pressure,” these studies, and the broader ideology of the establishment movement, fail to recognize that if coercion is defined as such, then their own legislation and efforts against Equal Rights Protection actually legalize the very thing they claim to oppose. If taking mifepristone is as legal as taking Tylenol, pressuring a woman to take it is just persuasion, which is perfectly legal. When abortion is illegal, that same pressure carries legal weight. This doesn’t just protect preborn children, it protects their mothers from being pressured into killing them. The point is this: you cannot claim to oppose abortion coercion while defending a legal regime in which the coercion you define as including pressure short of violence is itself lawful. Equal rights protection is not, therefore, an obstacle to protecting women from coercion and abortion pressure; it is the framework that actually does it. Those who claim to love women pressured into abortions, therefore, would do well not to oppose Equal Rights Protections, the very framework which protects those same women. Laws that protect preborn children from being killed also protect their mothers from being pressured into killing them. Any sound legislation will include clear standards for duress so that genuine cases of coercion are treated justly by judges and prosecutors.

Many are. The law should account for that through duress defenses and prosecutorial discretion. But the claim that most women are victims doesn’t survive scrutiny. The oft-cited Charlotte Lozier Institute study claiming “over 60%” of women experienced “coercion” later clarifies that it is referring to “modest interpersonal pressure,” not legal duress or coercion. As abortion pills become the dominant method, the mother is increasingly the primary actor. If we say “just punish the provider,” we ignore the growing reality that in many cases there is no provider, only a woman, a pill, and a dead child. Even Justice Blackmun in the original Roe v. Wade decision saw the inconsistency: he noted that Texas called the unborn a person yet didn’t treat the mother as a principal or accomplice, and asked: if the fetus is a person, why isn’t she? If we believe preborn children are persons, our laws must reflect it. According to the Guttmacher Institute, an estimated 48% of women who have an abortion have had a previous one. For a significant number of women, abortion is not something that “happens” to them, it is a deliberate, repeated choice. Our laws must protect these unborn children.

No. The long history of Western legal precedent is in stark opposition to the notion that justice would allow for an individual to be punished for a crime that was completely legal at the time it was committed. The ex post facto clause (Article I, Sections 9 & 10) of the U.S. Constitution prohibits federal and state governments from passing retroactive criminal laws that disadvantage a defendant.

No. Equal rights protection answers who the law protects, it does not prescribe any particular penalty. It seeks to bring the same legal protections to preborn children that currently apply to born children. The majority of states don’t even have the death penalty, and among those that do, the vast majority rarely implement it. The Supreme Court has ruled that an automatic death penalty for any homicide charge is itself unconstitutional (see Woodson v. North Carolina, 1976). A prosecutor must separately seek capital punishment, and a jury must unanimously find aggravating circumstances beyond a reasonable doubt. In 250 years of American history, no woman has ever received capital punishment for abortion. In the century before Roe, only two indictments were ever brought against women for their own abortions, neither resulting in conviction. The greater crisis today is not excessive punishment, it is whether there will be sufficient political will to protect preborn children at all when abortion pills are available by mail and self-induced abortions are rising.

Every Republican platform from 1984 to 2020 called for the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections to be extended to unborn children. For the first five years after Roe, the pro-life movement supported the Human Life Amendment without controversy. In 2024, the GOP retained the Fourteenth Amendment language but gutted the conclusion, repurposing it to justify leaving personhood up to each state. Forty years of platform language, stripped overnight. Equal rights protection is not a fringe position, it is a return to the movement’s first principles. And the political argument is hollow on its own terms: the pro-abortion left already accuses pro-lifers of wanting to jail women — even when bills include blanket maternal immunity. We are already paying the political cost without getting the policy.

Yes, and we’re grateful for every clinic that has been closed since Dobbs. But current laws still leave unborn children unprotected. Abortion pills are widely accessible even in states with restrictions, self-induced abortions are rising, and an estimated 71,000+ telehealth abortions were provided into restriction states in 2024 alone. Until preborn children are protected under the law, the work isn’t finished.

We don’t repeal homicide statutes because some murders go unsolved. The difficulty of enforcement has never been moral permission to abandon the victim. This objection applies a standard to the unborn that no one would apply to any other class of person, and it’s the same argument, word-for-word, that was made against forming child protection agencies in the 1960s: it happens behind closed doors, you can’t prove it, it would require invasions of privacy the public won’t accept, no prosecutor will bring it, no judge will convict. We built those agencies anyway, because the difficulty of enforcement does not give those tasked with defending innocent lives permission to abandon them.

Because equal rights protection is what we owe the preborn as persons, and until our laws grant it, we have not yet protected them as we ought. Every true pro-life gain since Dobbs has been worth celebrating, but no gain short of equal rights finishes the work. The urgency is also highly practical: self-induced abortion, a relatively recent technological innovation, has opened a massive enforcement gap. Nearly seventy percent of abortions are now carried out with pills, hundreds of thousands of them in states that claim to have banned abortion. Current laws have closed clinics; they have not protected children. Equal rights protection closes that gap, and gives these most vulnerable little ones the full measure of our duty owed them in law.