“Abortion abolition” bills harm the pro-life organizations that actually support women, she wrote.
By Catholics for Catholics
A Catholic writer for The Daily Wire makes the case that a new Tennessee bill that would treat abortion as a homicide might actually work against the pro-life movement.
Emily Zanotti, a writer from Tennessee, in her opinion story “A Radical Abortion Push Threatens Pro-Life Progress — And Women Could Pay The Price,” says that Tennessee’s HB 570, authored by Rep. Jody Barrett of Dickson and Sen. Mark Pody of Lebanon, wrote that “this is a misguided effort to punish women who end their pregnancies in a state where abortion is almost entirely banned, and it could endanger both women seeking care for a miscarriage and the crisis pregnancy centers that have stepped in to help women with unplanned pregnancies.”
Zanotti wrote that “the addendum to Tennessee’s HB 570 is also so poorly written as to be almost inscrutable, casting doubt on whether the two Tennessee legislators, Rep. Jody Barrett of Dickson and Rep. Mark Pody of Lebanon, even authored the bill with Tennesseans in mind.”
She added that “abortion is all but banned in Tennessee under a trigger law that went into effect immediately after the Supreme Court’s landmark Dobbs ruling sent the regulation of abortion back to the states. The two almost certainly didn’t consider the needs of women or the goals of the pro-life movement at large.”
The “abortion abolition” bills would impact in a negative way the pro-life organizations that work for women, putting them “in an untenable position of preaching compassion to pregnant women in a land of punishment — after years of work ensuring that Tennessee protects not only the most vulnerable among us, but also the women whose lives and futures are in the balance,” Zanotti wrote.
The case made by the authors, according to Zanotti, “is, of course, that these women are cold-blooded killers, not victims, and should receive punishment in kind. But we know, from decades of work in the pro-life movement, that abortions are often coerced, directly and indirectly, and that mothers who find themselves considering abortion outside of coercion often have complex motivations.”
“Life isn’t what you see on radical feminist TikTok; while some women could find joy in destruction, they are certainly not the majority,” Zanotti wrote. “Pro-lifers have dedicated themselves to meeting women where they are — in desperation, in poverty, at critical junctions, in fear, and in danger — and to treating each woman as a human, worthy of dignity and care.”
She wrote, “That message simply can’t coexist with a “pro-life” message that takes perverse joy in punishing women at their most vulnerable.”
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