(LifeSiteNews) – In a push to strengthen recognition of preborn babies as full persons with the same basic rights as any other American, 10 states have introduced legislation so far in 2025 to treat abortion as homicide within existing murder statutes, although they have met internal resistance from Republicans and pro-lifers who fear the legal and political fallout.

The Hill reported that, since the beginning of the year, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas have all seen bills introduced to treat abortion as homicide rather than a distinct offense with different penalties, and some of those measures extend to every form of destruction of an embryonic human (such as in vitro fertilization).

“Three of the bills — in Indiana, Oklahoma and North Dakota — have failed to pass this year,” the report noted. “And Georgia’s H.B. 441, which would modify state law to allow women to be charged with homicide for receiving an abortion, appears poised to fail as well.”

Thirteen states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrents via deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions.

The bills highlighted in the report represent a divide between pro-life activists who advocate “incrementalism,” chipping away at whatever abortions public opinion is amenable to stopping at the moment, and abortion “abolitionism,” which finds the incremental approach too tolerant of unjust outcomes and advocates more uncompromising action.

Incrementalists, who dominate the pro-life wing of mainstream GOP politics and most major pro-life groups, point to the general public’s lack of support for a full, no-exceptions abortion ban, and the volatile question of punishing the women who seek abortions, which some abolitionist proposals would do.

“Maybe instead of wasting our time on a circular firing squad and debating who can hand out the most prison sentences to prove that they are the most anti-abortion one out there, maybe get to work and elect 100 percent pro-life champions … who will stand with us to pass substantial legislation,” says Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America. SFLA says accountability for abortion should focus on the “predatory” abortion industry, not women deceived or pressured into aborting. 

Abolitionists, meanwhile, blame incrementalism for the pro-life position so often being on the defensive in the court of public opinion and argue it infantilizes women to assume they cannot or should not bear the responsibility of knowing what abortion destroys.

“Abolitionism has historically been wed to the doctrine of immediatism. The history of the pro-life movement has been one of gradualistic means and measures, incremental legislation, ameliorative programs, and the inclusion of exceptions to abortion along the way to its eventual total abolition,” says the group Abolish Human Abortion. “Abolitionists reject the idea that you can effectively fight evil by allowing it in some cases or do away with it by planned out incremental steps which preserve it along the way. Abolitionists reject the notion that you can ever commit evil in order that good may come. Abolitionists cry NO COMPROMISE!!! Pro-lifers cry ‘get the best that you can get when you can get it,’ and consistently support the ‘lesser of two evils.’”

But while those philosophical and strategic debates continue, many pro-lifers believe a more immediate concern is whether the fight over abortion’s legality will be relegated to individual states for the foreseeable future.

President Donald Trump has taken a number of pro-life actions since returning to office, including pardoning peaceful pro-life activists and closing multiple avenues for federal funding of the abortion industry. But he opposes further federal restrictions on abortion in favor of leaving the issue at the state level, and even rewrote the Republican Party platform to reflect that preference.

The variance of laws from state to state allows residents of a pro-life state to travel to a pro-abortion one to have their child killed, and abortion pills can easily be mailed across state lines and taken in private, which cannot easily be prevented once the package has been sent.

Last year, the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute published research finding that 63 percent of abortions in 2023 were committed via pills, continuing a steady rise from zero percent since 2000, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first approved mifepristone for abortion.

Pro-life advocates continue to call for a complete nationwide ban on abortion, and in February, Republican Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri reintroduced the Life at Conception Act, which would expressly recognize preborn children as persons qualifying for equal protection under the 14th Amendment. How such measures will fare in the current GOP remains to be seen.