Texas Republican says women who have abortions to should 'absolutely' be punished as murderers

Rep. Ron Wright (R-TX) told reproductive rights activists that women should "absolutely" face punishment for self-managed abortions.

The video, originally uploaded on May 30 by Reproaction and picked up by the Dallas Morning News, shows Wright, who represents Arlington, saying that "as far as I'm concerned, it's murder" and saying that women should "absolutely" be punished for having abortions. At that point, Wright's chief of staff Micah Cavanaugh stepped in and ended the exchange.

Roughly one in four women have an abortion at some point in their lives. The sustained attacks by the GOP on legal abortion and declining number of clinics, as well as the possibility that the conservative Supreme Court could abolish the constitutional right to an abortion altogether, have raised the possibility that millions of women in many parts of the country soon could need to resort to dangerous homemade methods to end pregnancies, possibly causing injury or death.

Wright's vision of punishing women for self-managed abortions is arguably even more extreme than the system that existed prior to Roe v. Wade. From the 1880s to the 1970s, when abortion was banned across the entire nation, it was possible to prosecute women, but it was very rare — rather, law enforcement tended to go after doctors that helped them, and usually only targeted women to try to force them to testify against providers. Newer abortion bans, like the one that just passed in Georgia, much more clearly lay out how the women themselves would be imprisoned.

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