What are Woman-Protective Anti-Abortion Arguments?

A Short Guide with Resources

Aug 27, 2025

Woman-protective anti-abortion arguments are insincere justifications for societal level reproductive coercion and state actions compelling pregnancy that masquerade as a concern for women’s well-being.

Back in 2013, “more than 300 provisions were introduced across the country to prevent access to abortion” under the guise of protecting women's health and safety.1 In August of that year, J. Pepper Bryars, the former press secretary and speechwriter for Alabama Gov. Bob Riley, authored an op-ed in which he proudly admitted that “abortion opponents' true goal [was] not to make abortion clinics safer [for women], but to close all abortion clinics.”2 "Our goal should remain… to make all abortion illegal and inaccessible… And our strategy and arguments should always support that long-term goal,” he added.3

Woman-protective anti-abortion arguments (WPAA) emerged as a strategy in the 1990s, “fueled by anti-abortion market research. According to John Willke, head of the National Right to Life Committee and pioneer of the 1970s' fetal-focused arguments, he embraced WPAA early in the 1990s when research showed that the movement's fetal-focused arguments were falling on deaf ears.”4 The prevailing public sentiment, Wilke discovered, was that “pro-life people were not compassionate to women and that we were only ‘fetus lovers’ who abandoned the mother after the birth. They felt that we were violent, that we burned down clinics and shot abortionists. We had to convince the public that we were compassionate to women.”5 In response to this research, Wilke created the now familiar slogan “Love Them Both,” and the anti-abortion movement began to argue that abortion harms women.6

“For audiences concerned about protecting women’s rights, woman-focused antiabortion argument was potentially conflict resolving: it could reassure those who hesitated to prohibit abortion because of concerns about women’s welfare that legal restrictions on abortion might instead be in women’s interest.”7 But WPAA fused “talk about women’s health and women’s rights with some very old forms of talk about women’s roles: Abortion must harm women because women are by nature mothers. Choosing against motherhood and subverting the physiology of pregnancy will make women ill—and in all events cannot represent what women really want, because any real woman wants what is best for her child. Women who seek abortions must have been confused, misled, or coerced into the decision to abort a pregnancy—because the choice to abort a pregnancy cannot reflect a normal woman’s true desires or interests. Using law to restrict abortion protects women from such pressures and confusions—and frees women to be true women.”8

WPAA is aimed at protecting fetuses by restricting women’s choices, which is said to be “good” for women. Advocating for restricting women’s rights because doing so is “good” for them “is advocating on the basis of a sex-role-based belief that, as Dorinda Bordlee [and other anti-abortion activists] emphasized,... ‘What’s good for the child is good for the mother. So now we’re advocating legislation that is good for the woman.’ On this sex-role-based view, there is no conflict of interests between women and the unborn life they bear because, as Bordlee explained, what is good for the child is good for the mother. A state can restrict abortion to protect the unborn and it is good for women’s health because what is good for children is good for women’s health. [This] descriptive claim is also a normative claim about sex roles that are ‘good’ for women.”9

Hence, activists spoke “about women’s health in a special, coded, sex-role-based way concerned with the wrongs of a woman ending a pregnancy—and not otherwise concerned with women’s physical wellbeing.”10

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In the 21st century, the use of woman-protective anti-abortion arguments has soared, especially those “belittling[] women's capacity for moral agency, often supposing that women who abort simply don't and can't understand what they are doing.”11 The proliferation of WPAAs infantilizing women is thanks in part to the decision in Gonzales v. Carhart (2007) “which held that abortion methods may be restricted because ‘some women come to regret their choice to abort,’”12 - even if a particular method of abortion is the safest method in certain circumstances. Justice Ginsburg, in her dissent, noted the dangerousness of restricting liberty on the basis that some people may later regret exercising their rights:

“It is hard to imagine any limits to the proposition that constitutional liberties can be restricted if it sometimes happens that someone regrets exercising the liberty in a given way. Some people who criticize actions of the government later wish that they had kept their mouths shut. Some criminal suspects regret that they didn't confess everything when the police first interrogated them. Some of the slaves freed by the Thirteenth Amendment were old and infirm, and some of them probably regretted leaving the plantation.”13

Here we see that WPAA are a type of “mutual benefits” argument. “Defenders of sex and race inequality often contend that women and people of color are better off with fewer rights and opportunities. This claim straddles substantive debates that are rarely considered together, linking such seemingly disparate disputes as the struggles over race-based affirmative action, antiabortion laws, and marital rape exemptions. The [mutual benefits] argument posits that women and people of color attempting to secure [] rights and opportunities do not understand their own best interests and do not realize that they benefit from limits on their prerogatives and choices. Indeed, proponents of this argument insist that restricting the rights and opportunities available to women and people of color helps everyone: the people misguidedly seeking [] rights and opportunities, the people opposing those claims, and [even] society as a whole. The beguiling conclusion is that the law need not decide between conflicting demands because all parties share aligned interests.”14 “[T]he antiabortion movement has recognized in increasingly explicit terms that many Americans are unwilling to criminalize abortion if doing so will harm women. The movement and its government allies have turned more and more to the language of aligned interests rather than competing rights, insisting that both women seeking abortions and people opposed to abortion are better off if the law restricts or prohibits abortion.”15

While downplaying the movement's gender-based assumptions about women, groups that oppose reproductive rights and autonomy are increasingly publishing “studies” to back up their assertions and beliefs, knowing that “most people (clinicians included) do not have the biostatistics training necessary to discern the methodological flaws and biases in much of the [anti-abortion] research.”16 Purported to “prove” that abortion harms women, these “studies” are designed to lend a veneer of scientific authority and credibility to WPAA.

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Despite the 21st century anti-abortion movement's emphasis on “science,” WPAA remains grounded in gender-paternalism. “Women’s decisions about abortion are shaped by circumstances that women face before conception and can foresee after birth.”17 “In fact, global studies show that highly restrictive abortion laws make abortion unsafe for women but do little to lower abortion rates.”18 “WPAA offers abortion-restrictions as a one-size-fits-all cure for the many social circumstances that lead women to end a pregnancy. The claim is that by restricting all women, government can free women to be the mothers they naturally are. Woman-protective antiabortion argument is gender-paternalist in just the sense that the old sex-based protective labor legislation was. It restricts women’s choices to free them to perform their natural role as mothers.”19

In short, woman-protective anti-abortion arguments are insincere justifications for societal level reproductive coercion and state actions compelling pregnancy and childbirth that masquerade as a concern for women’s well-being.

As WPAA continues to be weaponized against women and all who may become pregnant (including children), it's important to be able to recognize and confront these arguments. The following resources are excellent (and free!) resources on WPAA.

Bad Medicine: Abortion and the Battle Over Who Speaks for Women's Health (Andrea D. Friedman)
Infantilizing Women (S. P. Rogers, rePro-Truth)
MommyDearest? (Reva Siegel and Sarah Blustain)
Protecting Them from Themselves: The Persistence of Mutual Benefits Arguments for Sex and Race Inequality (Jill Elaine Hasday)
Self-Infantilizing Women: Paternalism in Abortion Lawmaking and Legislator Gender (Cherie H. Martin)
Stereotyping and the new Women-protective Antiabortion Movement (Cara Davies)
The Irrational Woman: Informed Consent and Abortion Decision-Making (Maya Manian)
The New Politics of Abortion: An Equality Analysis of Woman-Protective Abortion Restrictions (Reva Siegel)
The Right's Reasons: Constitutional Conflict and the Spread of Woman-Protected Antiabortion Argument (Reva Siegel)

rePro-Truth

What are Woman-Protective Anti-Abortion Arguments?

A Short Guide with Resources

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