For years, some state-level voices have floated the idea of punishing women for having abortions. And in recent months, a few national pro-life leaders have started calling for it more openly. They believe that arresting women might stop abortions from happening.
That thinking is deeply flawed because it ignores the pain and fear that lead so many women to that decision. It turns our movement away from compassion and toward control. And it forgets what we’re really here to do: walk with women, not weaponize their desperation.
I’ve been in this movement long enough to remember what that cost. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, I stood and sat outside abortion centers and blocked entry into those pits of hell with my body. I risked arrest and was arrested because I believed someone had to speak for the child who couldn’t. Those were tense, complicated days.
Follow LifeNews.com on Instagram for pro-life pictures and videos.
But even then, none of us ever called for jailing the women. We prayed with them. We pleaded. We took their hands. We knew the enemy wasn’t the woman in crisis; it was the lie that abortion would solve her problems.
That hasn’t changed.
Abortion doesn’t begin in courtrooms. It begins in fear, in the young mom staring at a pink line on a stick and feeling like she has no one.
It starts in kitchens with unpaid bills.
It begins with boyfriends who disappear, or employers who don’t understand, or healthcare systems that treat pregnancy like a liability.
It begins in isolation. When we argue to punish the woman, we exponentially double that isolation.
So, we as pro-lifers need to face some honest questions. If a woman believes abortion is her only option, have we truly met her in her moment of need? If she ends up at an abortion business instead of a pregnancy help center, what barriers kept her from finding us?
What did we miss?
We must resist the temptation to look for “quick fixes” in the criminal code. Arresting the woman might feel like a show of strength, but what it truly reveals is a weakness in our compassion. And worse, it will drive women away from the very places built to help them: our pregnancy resource centers.
Do we understand what that means? A woman in crisis may fear that walking into a pregnancy resource center puts her at risk of being reported, judged, or jailed. She might seek out one of the dangerous abortion options now available in states that have built their border economies around ending unborn life. Compassionate care becomes collateral damage in the rush to “get tough.”
That’s not pro-life. That’s just punitive.
Real pro-life advocacy means meeting women at the intersection of crisis and grace. It means offering ultrasounds, diapers, car seats, housing help, job support, counseling—yes, even forgiveness. It means welcoming women with tears on their cheeks and fear in their voices. It means turning our pregnancy resource centers into sanctuaries, not surveillance hubs.
Let’s not trade away our moral clarity for the illusion of control. We must remain the movement that offers help, not handcuffs. The movement that lifts up, not locks away, because abortion ends when support begins. Our movement’s job is not to scare women away from abortion with threats.
It’s to love them out of it with radical compassion, real alternatives, and relentless presence.
LifeNews.com Note: Raimundo Rojas is the Outreach Director for the National Right to Life Committee. He is a former president of Florida Right to Life and has presented the pro-life message to millions in Spanish-language media outlets. He represents NRLC at the United Nations as an NGO. Rojas was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Havana, Cuba and he and his family escaped to the United States in 1968.
