On the evening of May 24, 1704, a serving woman named Agnes Catherina Schickin walked through the gates of Schorndorf, a fortified town in the Duchy of Württemberg. She approached the first townsfolk she encountered and confessed that she had just murdered a seven-year-old boy in the forest. Schickin was taken into custody and authorities began to investigate her horrifying crime. Schickin informed the town magistrates that she had met the boy, Hans Michael Furch, earlier that day, playing by the roadside with three other “beautiful little boys.” She asked directions to Schorndorf, and offered Hans a gift to walk her home. The other boys wanted to come along, too, but she dissuaded them. Over the course of the day she was seen with the boy by several witnesses. One described her kneeling before him and delousing him.

But it was Schickin herself who described the murder. When Hans, weary of wandering the woods with her, essayed to head back home, she violently threw him to the ground. He begged for mercy, reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and twice she relented. But the third time, feeling “embittered,” as she put it, she drew her knife and slit his throat, declaring, “May God protect you, you sweet angel, you are an angel before God.” Schickin told the authorities that young Hans had been “saved,” and she could now “leave the world,” since the certain penalty for such a crime was public execution.

Schickin killed innocent young Hans because she wanted to end her own life, but believed—along with the rest of society—that committing suicide would mean not only the loss of her life, but the loss of her soul: eternal damnation for the crime of self-murder. But killing an innocent child, who had not yet sinned, would dispatch him to eternal bliss while affording her the opportunity to repent of her sins, be forgiven before God, and be released from her miserable life by the executioner.¹

What Can We Learn from “Suicide by Proxy”?

Schickin was not alone in making this macabre but—by the reasoning of her time—theologically and legally valid calculation. Historian Kathy Stuart has documented hundreds of such “suicide by proxy” cases, beginning at the end of the sixteenth century and running through the first part of the nineteenth century. Curiously, the vast majority of such cases were perpetrated by women.

This phenomenon persisted for over 200 years, among Catholics and Protestants alike, despite every effort the early modern state could devise to stop it. When Nuremberg authorities saw that beheading was not deterring such murders, they reintroduced the medieval punishments of amputation and the wheel in addition to beheading. Not only was this ineffective, it may even have made things worse. The Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein tried a contrary approach, dispensing with the death penalty for this crime and replacing it with branding, torture, hard labor, and annual public shaming. That didn’t work either.

I begin this discussion of so-called “equal protection” bills with the case of Agnes Schickin and the largely forgotten early modern epidemic of “suicide by proxy” because this historical episode teaches two important lessons for the pro-life movement today.

First, we must recognize that criminal law cannot be designed as if its only purpose were to express our convictions about the gravity of an offense or the value of its victims. When Schleswig and Holstein downgraded the penalty for this crime from execution to torture and shaming, that wasn’t because they came to value the lives of child victims less. On the contrary, public horror over these crimes was persistent through the whole period, with victims memorialized in pamphlets and ballads.

Second, we must not naively assume that harsh penalties will always work as a deterrent to crime in the way we hope, especially when it comes to acts of desperation. When Nuremberg added amputation and public torture on top of execution for these child murderers, they may actually have made the crime more attractive, allowing perpetrators to be the principals in a grand public drama concluding with the death by beheading that they sought.

These two lessons confront the two central arguments made by advocates of “equal protection” bills: (1) if we really believe the unborn child is a human being, we must prosecute all involved in its demise as we would for any other homicide and (2) this is the only way we can effectively deter women from getting abortions.

Calls for “Equal Protection” Are Growing

So far this year, bills have been introduced in at least twelve states that aim to “abolish” abortion, including changes to the criminal code that would prosecute women who get abortions with murder.² In some states, they could get the death penalty. Advocates of these bills invoke the principle of “equal protection,” the idea that killing an unborn baby is no different from killing anyone else.

Once a fringe position in the pro-life movement, calls to prosecute women for abortion are growing³—and not just from the self-described “Abolitionists” who have long denounced the mainstream incremental approach to protecting unborn children in the law. Former Planned Parenthood manager Abby Johnson, who has a massive online following, is now advocating for these measures in testimony before state legislative committees—and insisting that anyone who opposes them isn’t serious about ending abortion.⁴ In a recent debate at Yale with former Catholics for Choice president Francis Kissling, prominent pro-life personality Lila Rose advocated for criminal penalties for women who get abortions unless they can show they were coerced.⁵

These bills often include moving language about the value of the unborn child that will resonate with all of us in the pro-life movement. And we all share the goal of protecting the lives of these children to the fullest possible extent in the law. But despite the lofty language and good intentions, we must oppose any measure that would prosecute women for abortion.

It’s not just that pursuing these bills is a waste of resources, with even very conservative states like South Carolina and Oklahoma resoundingly rejecting them. Nor is it that the American people overwhelmingly oppose the idea, which conjures the ugliest stereotypes of our movement as vengeful and anti-woman. Prosecuting women isn’t just imprudent—it’s bad policy, and would only serve to shield abortionists from the law and drive their grisly business underground, while causing real harm to the women we claim to serve.

Pre-Roe Laws Targeted Abortionists, Not Women

It would be helpful to review the history of abortion law in the United States. Before Roe v. Wade swept away every state law protecting life in the womb, only a handful of state anti-abortion laws included any provision for prosecuting the woman. Lawmakers realized that the real culprit was the abortionist—the one who kills in cold blood, exploiting a desperate woman for money—and that to catch the abortionist, they would need the woman as a witness. Even when the law allowed for prosecuting the mother, the threat of prosecution was only used to get her to identify the abortionist.⁶

Those early anti-abortion pioneers recognized that women were being exploited by abortionists. They did not consider her innocent of all moral culpability, but still saw her involvement to be fundamentally different from the abortionist’s. They knew that a woman seeking an abortion doesn’t have the mindset of a murderer. As pro-life advocate Frederica Mathewes-Green put it, “No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg.”⁷

There is real wisdom in this understanding—ancient wisdom. As far back as the fourth century, the Council of Ancyra reduced the penance for the sin of abortion from exclusion from communion until the hour of death to exclusion for just ten years. This was the same penance as for involuntary homicide, but half that for murder. And lest we attribute this framing to ancient ignorance about fetal development, St. Basil of Caesarea clarified that this penance applied “whether the embryo were perfectly formed or not.” Ten years: That’s a serious sin. But the ancient church didn’t equate it with murder.⁸

Unwanted Abortion and Mens Rea

Today we have even more reason to see the woman as something other than a cold-blooded killer. After five decades of legal abortion, we know how often women are pressured into abortion by boyfriends, husbands, parents, employers, and others. New peer-reviewed research shows that only one-third of women who had abortions describe them as a free choice, with one in four describing their abortions as unwanted or even coerced. Sixty percent said they would have preferred to give birth if they had received the emotional or financial support they needed.⁹

This helps to explain the palpable ambivalence we hear from women about their abortion decisions, which is grimly on display on the website ShoutYourAbortion.com, launched to destigmatize abortion by allowing women to share their abortion stories. The site is replete with stories of women seeking forgiveness from their unborn children, begging them to return at a better time, even while justifying their choice. One woman quotes from a letter she wrote to the child she was about to abort: “I’m so sorry, little one. You deserve everything and I hope to be the one to give it to you.” This may be twisted logic, but it’s not malice aforethought.

We must also consider the issue of “informed consent,” especially in the age of abortion drugs, which can be acquired online and are often marketed as “missed period pills,” as if all they do is restore a woman’s regular cycle. And women are still being told that the child in the womb is just a “clump of cells”—propaganda from the abortion industry and their media allies that reaches into every state with anti-abortion laws on the books.

All of this means that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for prosecutors to establish the mens rea or “state of mind” of the woman on trial for abortion. Mens rea is a key component in any homicide case. It’s one of the reasons we have different categories of homicide. Another reason is that un-der our system, convictions require solid evidence of criminality—evidence that must be collected by police detectives.

Advocates of “equal protection” measures overlook this crucial point. They have the idea that if you don’t prosecute the mother for homicide, you don’t really value the unborn child. But that’s not how our legal system works. The law is not primarily an expression of how much we value crime victims, but of how we can best address problems in the real world. A prosecutor doesn’t indict someone with first-degree murder because of how valuable the victim is, but because of how strong a case they can make for conviction.

And the case against women who get abortions has proven very hard to make. In general, women who participate in the deaths of their own children—nearly always an act of desperation—make sympathetic figures to juries. All-male juries in early twentieth century Britain were so reluctant to convict women who killed their newborns that Parliament created the new crime of “infanticide” to give more weight to these crimes. Those same juries were even less willing to convict women for abortion.¹⁰

Abortion Is Not Like Other Homicides

One reason that prosecutors would struggle to get convictions for abortion is that abortion is just not like other homicides. Advocates for prosecuting women sometimes make a comparison between hiring a hitman and getting an abortion, but this comparison actually reveals how different abortion is. The person who hires a hitman does so in cold blood, seeking to end the life of someone they can see, name, and interact with, for their own selfish reasons.

A woman who gets an abortion is rarely doing so for purely selfish reasons, as our growing understanding of unwanted abortions shows. Even without another person pushing her to abort, she worries about caring for the children she already has, holding down her job during pregnancy and the months after birth, paying higher rent for the additional space needed to care for a child. These are not “selfish” reasons.

Moreover, unlike the victim of all other forms of homicide, the victim of abortion cannot be seen or heard, has no name, has never smiled or cooed or cried. The unborn child is a total stranger to the mother. She doesn’t conceive of the child as her enemy—though it does compete with her for nutrients; the placenta, that common organ she shares with the mysterious life within her, will generally prioritize her unborn child when levels of calcium, iron, and folate are too low for both to get what they need.11 There is a kind of competition between mother and child that we in the pro-life movement are reluctant to admit. But it is real, and part of what makes this relationship unique. No matter how singularly burdensome pregnancy may be, the mother has no animus towards the actual person that her child already is and would one day be revealed to be. She just wants to be “unpregnant.” To demand that she be considered an accessory to murder ignores the unique aspects of abortion and how pregnancy and childbirth impact women, especially disadvantaged women.

“Equal Protection” Is Not Equal

Even if we could ignore the uniqueness of abortion, the penalties of an “equal protection” law would not be meted out equally. Instead, those penal-ties would fall disproportionately on women—specifically on poor and minority women, who undergo a disproportionate number of abortions despite being, by every available measure, more pro-life than their wealthier counterparts. The gap between their stated convictions and their behavior reveals how often abortion is chosen against a woman’s own moral commitments.¹² Every single abortion prosecution would target the mother; she is the one who is always visible to the law, while others—the father, the provider, anyone who pushed her to abort—can remain hidden. It will be the mother showing up at the ER suffering abortion complications, or the mother being turned in by someone she has confided in.

It’s appropriate here to consider the impact “equal protection” laws would have on the work of pregnancy care centers. What woman would confide to a pro-life counselor that she’s considering abortion when such a statement could be seen as a confession that she plans to commit a felony? What woman would share her story of abortion regret if it could trigger her prosecution for murder? Under the “equal protection” regime, pregnancy centers would be cast as evidence-gathering operations to be avoided at all costs.

Meanwhile, what happens to the father? He would only face prosecution if the mother turned him in. But even then, it would be her word against his. What of the father who opposes the abortion, but is now faced with the prospect of turning in his wife or girlfriend to the police—just like anyone else who has knowledge of a planned felony? What does that do to his hopes of changing her mind?

As for the abortion provider, the only one who can identify him to the authorities is the woman. But now she’s a co-conspirator, who has a Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself. The only way to get her co-operation is to grant her immunity—and then the whole “equal protection” premise collapses.

That said, she’s not even likely to be able to identify the provider when nearly all abortions in states with abortion bans are done via mail order abortion pills—many of them coming from outside the United States. The abortion provider gets off scot-free, or is actually shielded from prosecution when the only witness against him has been silenced by the threat of her own prosecution.

A final point worth making here is that the reality of prosecuting women for abortion in the era of abortion pills would be an evidentiary nightmare, with miscarriage and medication abortion being clinically indistinguishable. Monica Snyder, the executive director of Secular Pro-Life with a background in forensics, has powerfully made the case that there is no way to enforce such a law justly. Either tens of thousands of women who miscarry would be swept into criminal investigations, or the law would go almost entirely unenforced.¹³

Prosecuting Doesn’t Work: Brazil

Let us put these hypotheticals to one side and look at an actual case of a jurisdiction with criminal penalties on the books for women who get abortions. Abortion is illegal in Brazil, with the law penalizing both women and abortion providers. And yet at least half a million unborn babies are aborted every year.¹⁴

In Brazil, rich women know where to go for relatively safe abortions, and poor women know where to go for dangerous abortions—with an extremely high rate of complications that require emergency care.¹⁵ As might be expect-ed from the foregoing discussion, indictments for the crime of abortion are rare in Brazil—only about 300 cases a year, with a conviction rate of about 10 %. Even so, women prosecuted for abortion in Brazil are overwhelmingly if not exclusively poor, and most often black.¹⁶

Our legal system may be more equitable than Brazil’s, but it’s hard to imagine that the impact of prosecuting women—in both prison time and dangerous botched abortions—would not fall overwhelmingly on the most disadvantaged among us. There’s nothing “equal” about that.

We Must Oppose These Bills

Thankfully, none of these horrors will come to pass, because none of these bills has any hope of being enacted by any state in the Union. But the campaign to introduce and rally behind these bills is already doing real harm to the pro-life movement.

Though less than 3 percent of Republican state legislators support such measures, Republican caucuses and state pro-life organizations face backlash whenever they’re introduced.¹⁷ Headlines like “Four States Consider Bills To Treat Women Who Get Abortions as Murderers” tar the entire pro-life movement as vengeful and out of touch.¹⁸ More than that, they can make pro-life lawmakers reluctant to touch the issue—as in South Carolina, where battles over such bills have scuttled the effort to protect children from abortion before the sixth week of pregnancy.¹⁹

Our public officials have little appetite for punishing women—a quality sometimes shared by their predecessors in early modern Germany, whose efforts to curtail “suicide by proxy” we opened with. Agnes Schickin was never executed for killing seven-year-old Hans Furch; the Tübingen scholars who reviewed her case found her so deranged by despair that they recommended she be spared the scaffold, and she was flogged in prison instead.²⁰

The epidemic of suicide by proxy didn’t end when magistrates finally worked out the right formula for punishing perpetrators of these heinous crimes of despair. Every penalty had been tried; none had worked. Suicide by proxy only disappeared when the incentive structure that brought it into being was finally dismantled: the public executions, the entanglement of church and state, the theological terror surrounding self-murder.²¹ The crime stopped when the conditions that produced it were no longer operative.

That is the lesson advocates of “equal protection” have inverted. Abortion will not end when we find the right punishment for the women who seek it. It will end when we dismantle the social conditions that push and pull women towards abortion—poverty, lack of housing, job insecurity, male abandonment, intimate partner violence, an overall lack of support for marriage and family, and social disdain for the sacrifices of parenthood. That also includes the supply side of abortion, where the threat of prosecution actually works: providers in abortion-ban states have closed up shop. That’s where we must concentrate our law enforcement efforts—not on women desperate enough to seek abortion.

I invite you to join me in standing firmly against any measure that would prosecute women for abortion. It’s up to God to judge their moral culpability. And it’s up to us, with His help, to work towards a world where no woman feels abortion is her only choice.

NOTES

1. Kathy Stuart, “Suicide by Proxy: The Unintended Consequences of Public Executions in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Central European History 41, no. 3 (September 2008): 413–45, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20457368

2. Foundation to Abolish Abortion, “States,” map dated March 11, 2026, accessed April 30, 2026, https://faa.life/states

3. Christine Fernando, “An Emboldened Anti-Abortion Faction Wants Women Who Have Abortions to Face Criminal Charges,” Associated Press, April 12, 2025, https://www.nbcwashington. com/news/national-international/emboldened-anti-abortion-women-face-criminal-charges/3890868/

4. Rebecca Carlson, “Yes, Abby Johnson, We Do Care About Ending Abortion,” Equal Rights Institute (blog), July 3, 2025, https://blog.equalrightsinstitute.com/yes-abby-johnson-we-do-care/

5. Lila Rose and Frances Kissling, “Abortion and Human Rights Debate: Lila Rose & Frances Kissling at Yale University,” debate hosted by the Yale Political Union, September 16, 2025, YouTube video, posted by Live Action, September 17, 2025, at 58:31, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vwK8Lb1nJf0

6. Clarke Forsythe, “Why the States Did Not Prosecute Women for Abortion Before Roe v. Wade,” Americans United for Life, April 23, 2010, https://aul.org/2010/04/23/why-the-states-did-not-prosecute-women-for-abortion-before-roe-v-wade/

7. Frederica Mathewes-Green, “When Abortion Suddenly Stopped Making Sense,” National Review, January 22, 2016, https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/01/abortion-roe-v-wade-unborn-children-women-feminism-march-life/

8. Daniel K. Williams, Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of Roe v. Wade (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2025), 47

9. David C. Reardon, Katherine A. Rafferty, and Tessa Longbons, “The Effects of Abortion Decision Rightness and Decision Type on Women’s Satisfaction and Mental Health,” Cureus 15, no. 5 (May 2023): e38882, https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.38882

10. Louise Perry, “We Are Repaganizing,” First Things, October 2023, https://firstthings.com/we-are-repaganizing/

11. Natalia Diaz-Burke and Mary E. Cox, “Nutrient Transfer During Pregnancy,” in Nutrition Through the Life Cycle (University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2020), https://pressbooks.nebraska.edu/ nutr251/chapter/nutrient-transfer-during-pregnancy/

12. Patrick T. Brown, “Why Poor Women with Unintended Pregnancies Are Less Likely to Get Abortions,” Institute for Family Studies, March 23, 2015, https://ifstudies.org/blog/why-poor-women-with-unintended-pregnancies-are-less-likely-to-get-abortions

13. Monica Snyder, “6 Reasons Equal Protection Laws Can’t Be Enforced Justly,” Secular Pro-Life, April 29, 2026, https://secularprolife.org/2026/04/6-reasons-equal-protection-enforcement/

14. “Abortion in Brazil: The Case for Women’s Rights, Lives, and Choices,” editorial, Lancet Public Health 4, no. 11 (November 2019): e549, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(19)30204-X

15. “Abortion in Brazil,” Lancet Public Health.

16. Clooney Foundation for Justice, “Brazil,” accessed April 30, 2026, https://cfj.org/country/brazil/.

17. Clarke D. Forsythe, “The Wrong Tool for Protecting Women from Abortion,” National Review, September 22, 2025, https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/09/the-wrong-tool-for-protecting-women-from-abortion/

18. Elizabeth Nolan Brown, “4 States Consider Bills to Treat Women Who Get Abortions as Murderers,” Reason, January 29, 2025, https://reason.com/2025/01/29/4-states-consider-bills-to-treat-women-who-get-abortions-as-murderers/

19. Hayden Laye (Pro-Life Greenville), Zoom meeting with the author, February 10, 2026.

20. Kathy Stuart, interview by Amy Quinton, “Murder, Suicide and the Macabre,” Unfold (podcast), UC Davis, October 26, 2021, https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/podcasts-and-shows/unfold/murder-suicide-and-macabre

21. Kathy Stuart, Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin and Salvation, World Histories of Crime, Culture and Violence (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).

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Original Bio:

 

Eric J. Scheidler is the executive director of the Pro-Life Action League, a direct action anti-abortion organization founded in 1980 by his late father, Joe Scheidler.