“While we believe that abortion is murder, the taking of an unborn baby’s life,” pro-life advocates have declared since the Roe v. Wade ruling, “we will never charge a woman who has had an abortion with murder.”

But between the Roe decision and 2014, at least 750 women have been charged with murder or other felonies for having miscarriages or attempting self-abortions, according to Duke University’s Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law and the Guttmacher Institute (1).

Last year, pro-life activists cheered the passage of strict anti-abortion laws in Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, and other states, again promising that these laws would never allow a woman to be charged with murder after having an abortion. But under the Alabama law, a woman might be charged with a felony if she performs an abortion upon herself by, for example, taking a pill (2). Under the Georgia law, a fetus is considered a citizen of Georgia, meaning that a woman who miscarries is at risk of being charged with a felony (1).

Why the dissonance between reassuring words and edgy actions?

Consider the following vignettes:

During a group dinner celebrating the completion of a five-day conflict resolution program in the late 1990s, I ranted about how some of my bosses didn’t take me seriously because I was blind. A retired NFL player who was black put a heavy, comforting hand on my shoulder and described how an employer was happy to have him as “a trophy hire” until he began showing an independent streak. “They couldn’t get rid of me fast enough,” he said, his voice tinged with bitterness.

Several years later, a future boss told me at the end of my second interview that she admired the way I did good work independently, and that I might be a good role model for her father, who had recently become blind. A year later, she told me that I needed to improve my communication skills because I was too independent. She was forced to resign before she could fire me.

These vignettes show how authority figures sometimes use people with significant differences as trophies: totems that confer status to the trophy-holder and, in the case of trophies who are people, allow the holder to signal their virtue for doing something nice for a person different from themselves. But trophies can be discarded when something more attractive and compliant comes along, and the damage to discarded human trophies can be profound.

Pro-choice men engage in “trophyism” when they bully, threaten, or discard women after finding out they are pregnant. Meanwhile Pro-life advocates, especially men, must signal empathy towards women considering abortion, and most women with unwanted pregnancies are experiencing some combination of domestic violence, poverty, discrimination, substance abuse, abandonment, the fear of having to raise a disabled child, and, less often, rape and incest. While the empathy of most pro-life people is genuine, a vocal minority of pro-life activists (again, mostly men) seem to view women with unwanted pregnancies as trophies to be fawned over and controlled.

“I know it’s hard,” I heard Dr. James Dobson and other pro-life men say several times in cloying tones to women with unwanted pregnancies on Focus on the Family between 1994 and 2004. “I wish I could give you a hug, for I know you really don’t want to kill that precious life inside you.”

While at the same time comparing abortion to World War II Germany and slavery.

But what happens if a woman decides to have the abortion after an encounter with a pro-life man that Dr. Dobson envisioned?

Some learn from this experience to be better allies to women with crisis pregnancies. Some shrug their shoulders and move on. Some gossip about this woman to anyone who will listen.

And a few with the right credentials charge a few women with murder.

All in the spirit of tough love so that other misguided women won’t make the same mistake while signaling their undying support for the pro-life cause.

Just as some managers isolate their trophy hires when their trophies don’t behave properly, replacing them with specimens that boost these trophy-holders’ egos while signaling their unwavering willingness to be a team player.

(1) https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/the-republican-party-is-on-the-road-to-mass-lockups-for-women-who-have-miscarriages-2/

(2) https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/how-state-efforts-to-re-criminalize-abortion-are-an-echo-of-americas-eugenics-past/