Articles covering state abortion laws often contain information like this, from an Associated Press report: “Violators could face up to five years in prison. Physicians and other medical professionals could lose their licenses and face administrative fines of $10,000 for each violation.”
Reading this, you could be forgiven for assuming that “violators” means “women.” In fact, pro-life laws uniformly target their penalties at those who provide abortion procedures or abortion-inducing drugs, not the women who seek or obtain them. It’s interesting that media reports on pro-life laws so often fail to include that fact, which is readily available just from reading the texts of the laws in question. As John McCormack has noted recently, the pro-life movement is nearly unanimous in the belief that targeting abortionists is the most appropriate way to enforce laws against abortion.