Abortion abolitionism's shame-based legalism. I will never support it.

By Victoria Robinson, Op-ed contributor Saturday, February 07, 2026

Forty years ago, I made the worst decision of my life when, as a desperate, single mom of two kids, I aborted my third child. 

I’ve since found forgiveness in Jesus Christ, and part of my redemptive journey has been playing an active role in the pro-life movement for three decades. Today, I regularly host retreats and help post-abortive women find healing with an organization I founded called Reassemble.

Yet at present, the broader pro-life movement I’ve long championed is being divided internally by those with a radically different approach. They call themselves “abolitionists.” They are leading with hard-edged, shame-based legalism, and it has grieved me to the core to see their graceless, harsh influence seep into key advocacy spaces. 

For those who do not know, abortion abolitionists propose a legal regime wherein the woman who procures an abortion is criminalized, treating her as a murderer, without meaningfully distinguishing between the woman and the abortionist who performs the procedure. This has no chance of passing anywhere, even in conservative states with strong pro-life laws on the books. 

But the more visible change is how these abolitionists promote both rhetoric and a different narrative that women should know better, that they are killing their children out of selfishness, and that they are not the “second victims” of abortion, often citing as proof those women who brag about and “shout” their abortions on TikTok. 

As horrifying as those TikTok videos are, they do not represent the vast majority of abortion-minded women, and the abolitionist “Christian” rhetoric is driving them away from the pro-life movement. Their approach further shames post-abortive women who are still dealing with the traumatic aftermath of their choices, and those who are now active or considering being active in the fight for the unborn. 

Case in point, I recently attended a pro-life gathering in which a panel of speakers referred to women who choose abortion as “murderers who deserve to be criminalized,” and insisted they were not “the other victim.”

Sitting in the audience was a post-abortive woman who is trying to find her place in the pro-life movement, while still dealing with years of regret, shame, and trauma from her own abortion decision some decades ago. As she listened to their condemnations, coming from pro-life speakers she’d once admired, she started having a panic attack and had to remove herself from the room, struggling to breathe. Their words echoed in her head days later. 

How can this type of message cause a woman who is living in the shame and regret of abortion to run to the Church? To Christ? To the pro-life movement? It won’t; it will only drive her further away and harden her.

Someone asked me, “But Victoria, don’t you think if you were faced with being criminalized, you would have made a different choice [not to abort]?” 

I replied: “You’re asking the wrong question. The question you should be asking is, if your boyfriend had been the man he should have been and stepped up and faced his responsibilities, do you think you would have made a different choice?” 

Practically, among abolitionists, there is little, if any, consideration given to the woman's often desperate circumstances, or how abortion advocates might have misled her or lied to her. Rarely do abolitionists speak of the man who co-created the pregnancy and how he might have coerced her into undergoing an abortion against her will, and how he should be penalized. Abolitionists refuse to recognize how the multi-billion-dollar abortion industry is meticulously trained to manipulate a woman during the most vulnerable moments of her life and prey on her desperation. Instead, the majority of their energy is focused on legally punishing her. 

Abolitionists will insist, unfazed: “But they know exactly what they’re doing, Victoria. This is 2026. Women aren’t victims anymore. They're just selfish, and they need to be held accountable for murdering their unborn children.” 

This is simply not true. The deception of the abortion industry remains pervasive, particularly with the advance of abortion drugs being sent through the mail.

Week after week, I regularly receive phone calls from distraught women who took abortion pills, ultimately delivering their intact babies. They scream into the phone about how abortion advocates deceived them: “They lied to me! They told me it would be clotting like a period. No one ever told me that I would see an actual baby, my baby!”

Consider also the abolitionist implications for the beating heart of the pro-life movement — the nonprofit pregnancy resource centers (PRC's) across the country that serve women facing crisis pregnancies, offering a range of services from counseling to medical care, baby clothes and diapers, all free of charge. Appallingly, I have even heard chatter among certain abolitionists and their ideologically adjacent allies suggesting that staffers at these wholesome organizations betray a woman who walks into such a center who shares her story or confesses that she is considering an abortion or has one already scheduled by turning her in to the authorities. Keep in mind that how PRC's have saved countless unborn children from abortion, but it seems these rigid ideologues would prefer these hands-and-feet-of-Jesus groups become legal mouse traps to the women in crisis. 

Redeemed, post-abortive women (and men) are a vital part of ending abortion. Their voices matter, and they must be heard. But they will never come out of hiding if the very movement that should extend love, grace, and support calls them murderers and demands steep legal penalties. 

To be sure and to be fair, not every abolitionist shames women, but far too many do, and their voices are getting louder. Some of them are simply frustrated with the ongoing culture of abortion in the wake of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, and they are persuaded of the need for a new vision to end abortion. Indeed, there is no easy fix, but this tactic definitely isn’t it. 

Let me stress that I believe abortion is, in fact, murder, and I want to see it ended in my lifetime. In that sense, I am an abolitionist as well. But it is particularly necessary in this post-Dobbs era that we continue to raise up an army of healed, post-abortive women and men to speak out and tell the truth. But why would they choose to come forward when they’re made to feel like criminals? How can we expect them to speak up if they fear more judgment and condemnation? 

When Jesus interacted with the adulterous woman in John 8, surrounded by those ready to stone her, He approached them and asked for the first one without sin to throw the first stone. No one came forward, as no one was qualified. In the same way, this is what many abolitionists are doing with their words. While we all want to see abortion abolished, on that we can agree, we do not agree on how to get there. All legal considerations aside, their rhetorical approach does not reflect the heart of Christ, and I will never support it. 

If advocates for the unborn start replacing the compassion that has characterized our movement with accusatory shaming along the lines of “she’s a selfish murderer, not a victim,” the backlash we have witnessed will only increase, existing laws protecting the unborn will continue to erode, and the larger movement to protect the unborn will fail. 

As a passionate pro-life advocate, that must not be allowed to happen.