The six-week abortion bans are only a beginning. The abortion abolition movement is on the rise.

Following the abortion legislation in 2019, it's like holding a swimming competition where all competitors come to swap their baggy swim shorts against Speedos. Records are beating left and right, with a growing number of states competing to install the country's most restrictive law. And all this is much faster than what is expected of spectators in the stands.

Since the beginning of the year, 14 states have passed, introduced or introduced legislation prohibiting abortions performed after approximately six weeks of pregnancy. (Conservatives call this "heartbeat bills" because the fetal heart's activity is usually visible after a vaginal ultrasound scan after six weeks of pregnancy.) Abortion forbids this extreme: a lot of people do not even know they're pregnant so early – are both recent and rare. Ohio introduced the first six-week ban in 2011, but it was not passed. Since then, until this year, only two states have managed to pass such a ban: North Dakota in 2013 and Iowa in 2018. The courts have both invalidated them, ruling that the case law Supreme Court protected abortion rights to the point of fetal viability, around 24 weeks of gestation.

But over the last three months, the governors of Kentucky, Mississippi and (eight years after the failure of his initial efforts) have all signed a six-week abortion ban. The governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, announced his support for a project recently adopted by the legislature of Georgia. Similar bills are also in place in the legislatures of Missouri and Tennessee and have been introduced in eight other states. Abortion advocates say that 2019 saw a two-thirds increase in the number of six-week bans introduced compared to the same period last year.

In recent years, anti-abortion politicians have always acted with caution. With the precedents of the Supreme Court of Roe v. Wade and Parenting Planning v. Casey intact, most have taken a step-by-step approach to dismantling the right to abortion, lest a dramatic backtracking be dismissed by the courts, reinforcing the roe and Casey precedents. In 2016, while she called herself "the most pro-life governor of the country," Mary Fallin, governor of Oklahoma, had then vetoed a bill that would would have made any abortion a crime in the state. As Governor of Ohio, John Kasich was commended by anti-abortion activists who said he was "laser focused" on the regulation of abortion. But in 2016, Kasich vetoed a six-week ban in favor of a more moderate ban of 20 weeks.

Many things have changed in the last three years. Anti-abortion campaigners saw in Donald Trump's election the beginning of the end of abortion rights. ("Hopefully this will be the last step we have to have," said a March protester for life in January 2017.) Trump met their expectations by naming Brett Kavanaugh, who had proven his anti-authenticity – abortion as a federal mandatary. judge, and changed the ideological composition of the Supreme Court. In the legislatures and the GOP-dominated governors' offices, it was like a turnaround. Republican lawmakers felt encouraged to adopt what it would have previously considered to be patently unconstitutional legislation on abortion, knowing that the newly appointed Supreme Court and lower courts of Trump appointees would likely their side. Instead of finding ways to restrict access to abortion by indirect means such as building codes, anti-abortion politicians have sought to: roe himself.

It is not only abortion legislation that is becoming increasingly extreme. The anti-abortion movement itself seems to be taking more signals from its far-right fringes – groups that reject the term anti-abortion and instead call "abolitionist abortion". Abortionists abolish ideological purity over progressive victories. For example, they are fighting the exceptions for rape and incest cases that make anti-abortion bills acceptable to more moderate voters. Using quotations from Martin Luther King Jr. and the language of the civil rights and anti-slavery movements, abolitionists carry the main argument of the anti-abortion movement – abortion is the murder of women. a human being – up to its logical conclusion: the abortion should be pursued as homicide.

Earlier this week, hundreds of abortion abortionists testified in favor of a Texas bill that would classify all abortions as homicides. and Remove the Texas Penal Code line that exempts women from being charged with murder after having an abortion. If the bill is passed, women who have an abortion could face the death penalty.

According to anti-abortion activists, it was the first time that a legislative hearing in the United States was banned without exception, the proceedings being considered a homicide. Although the bill is unlikely to be passed, the fact that the Republican leaders of the Texas legislature decided to grant him a hearing and allowed more than 400 people to testify in favor of treating women seeking an abortion as a murderer, which marks a shocking change in the party's public rhetoric.

"The Texas Penal Code already defines an individual as" a living human being, including an unborn child from birth until birth, "said representative Tony Tinderholt, author of the bill, in a statement to Slate. "However, Texas law provides for two exceptions to the homicide: for a mother or a health professional who practices an abortion. … Some people think that we should exempt mothers, but that would naturally treat unborn children differently than other murdered people. "

The passage of female victims to victims rather than judging them as murderers will take place quickly.

The idea that women should be prosecuted as murderers for ending their pregnancy has not been a topic of discussion for the traditional pro-life movement. In public, defenders generally prefer to portray these women as victims of a profit-hungry abortion "industry" led by Planned Parenthood. When Trump said in 2016 that women should be punished if they have an abortion, some large anti-abortion groups were gently pushed back, reminding Trump that the scourge of abortion would be a sufficient punishment. But an undercurrent of judgment and a desire for revenge have always run beneath the surface of the anti-abortion movement. It is impossible to reconcile a world view in which abortion is murder, but the half million American women who have an abortion every year has done nothing wrong.

Now that Texas lawmakers have led the way, I predict that more politicians and activists will start changing public postures. Anti-abortion politicians are constantly trying to outdo each other – just look at all the governors who claim to run the country's "most pro-life" state. If the accelerated pace of extreme anti-abortion legislation in 2019 is an indication, the passage of female victims to victims rather than judging them as murderers will be done quickly, without concern for public justification. Less than three years ago, many people interpreted the six-week abortion ban that Kasich vetoed in Ohio as a distraction – an outrageous bill, ostensibly unconstitutional, adopted to make the 20-week ban more reasonable. Now, this six-week ban is legal. It is enough for a group of persistent activists and some bold legislators to make the imaginable thinkable, the radical radical. The abolitionist moonshot of abortion will look like an extremist movement, until it becomes the norm.