Abortion rights advocates are closely following what they call a growing and alarming trend: lawmakers in several states have introduced bills that would allow authorities to charge people who obtain abortions with homicide.

Such bills have been introduced in at least 10 states for the 2025 legislative session: Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is tracking these proposals. Most of those states have already banned abortion either in nearly all circumstances or after six weeks of pregnancy. (Missouri and North Dakota are the only exceptions; both of them previously had near-total abortion bans that have since been overturned.)

The bills refer to an embryo or fetus as an “unborn child” or “preborn child.” They claim that an embryo or fetus can be a homicide victim, opening the door for authorities to charge and prosecute people who seek abortions. Some of the bills also propose removing clauses from state laws that protected pregnant people seeking abortions from prosecution. The bills include limited exceptions, such as in a situation resulting in “the unintentional death of a preborn child” after “life-saving procedures to save the life of a mother when accompanied by reasonable steps, if available, to save the life of her preborn child.”

Lizzy Hinkley, senior state legislative counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, says she believes there has been an uptick in the number of these bills that have been introduced this year, which is “very, very alarming.” Hinkley points out that many of the states considering these bills, such as South Carolina, allow for the death penalty.

“It’s very much right out of the anti-abortion playbook to be introducing bills that try to control, try to oppress, and punish pregnant people,” she says.

Three of these bills—in Indiana, North Dakota, and Oklahoma—have since failed to advance. And Mary Ziegler—a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law with expertise in abortion—says the likelihood of the remaining bills passing is “relatively low.” These types of proposals are generally unpopular; Ziegler says that even conservatives and anti-abortion activists are divided on whether to penalize people seeking abortions.

“Having said that, I think [these bills are] more likely to pass now than they were in previous years, and the fact that they keep coming back is significant,” Ziegler says. She adds that more of these bills have been introduced since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ended the constitutional right to abortion.