On the evening of May 24, 1704, a serving woman named Agnes Catherina Schickin walked through the gates of Schorndorf, a fortified town in the Duchy of Württemberg. She approached the first townsfolk she encountered and confessed that she had just murdered a seven-year-old boy in the forest. Schickin was taken into custody and authorities began to investigate her horrifying crime. Schickin informed the town magistrates that she had met the boy, Hans Michael Furch, earlier that day, playing by the roadside with three other “beautiful little boys.” She asked directions to Schorndorf, and offered Hans a gift to walk her home. The other boys wanted to come along, too, but she dissuaded them. Over the course of the day she was seen with the boy by several witnesses. One described her kneeling before him and delousing him.

But it was Schickin herself who described the murder. When Hans, weary of wandering the woods with her, essayed to head back home, she violently threw him to the ground. He begged for mercy, reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and twice she relented. But the third time, feeling “embittered,” as she put it, she drew her knife and slit his throat, declaring, “May God protect you, you sweet angel, you are an angel before God.” Schickin told the authorities that young Hans had been “saved,” and she could now “leave the world,” since the certain penalty for such a crime was public execution.

Schickin killed innocent young Hans because she wanted to end her own life, but believed—along with the rest of society—that committing suicide would mean not only the loss of her life, but the loss of her soul: eternal damnation for the crime of self-murder. But killing an innocent child, who had not yet sinned, would dispatch him to eternal bliss while affording her the opportunity to repent of her sins, be forgiven before God, and be released from her miserable life by the executioner.¹

What Can We Learn from “Suicide by Proxy”?

Schickin was not alone in making this macabre but—by the reasoning of her time—theologically and legally valid calculation. Historian Kathy Stuart has documented hundreds of such “suicide by proxy” cases, beginning at the end of the sixteenth century and running through the first part of the nineteenth century. Curiously, the vast majority of such cases were perpetrated by women.

This phenomenon persisted for over 200 years, among Catholics and Protestants alike, despite every effort the early modern state could devise to stop it. When Nuremberg authorities saw that beheading was not deterring such murders, they reintroduced the medieval punishments of amputation and the wheel in addition to beheading. Not only was this ineffective, it may even have made things worse. The Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein tried a contrary approach, dispensing with the death penalty for this crime and replacing it with branding, torture, hard labor, and annual public shaming. That didn’t work either.

I begin this discussion of so-called “equal protection” bills with the case of Agnes Schickin and the largely forgotten early modern epidemic of “suicide by proxy” because this historical episode teaches two important lessons for the pro-life movement today.

First, we must recognize that criminal law cannot be designed as if its only purpose were to express our convictions about the gravity of an offense or the value of its victims. When Schleswig and Holstein downgraded the penalty for this crime from execution to torture and shaming, that wasn’t because they came to value the lives of child victims less. On the contrary, public horror over these crimes was persistent through the whole period, with victims memorialized in pamphlets and ballads.

Second, we must not naively assume that harsh penalties will always work as a deterrent to crime in the way we hope, especially when it comes to acts of desperation. When Nuremberg added amputation and public torture on top of execution for these child murderers, they may actually have made the crime more attractive, allowing perpetrators to be the principals in a grand public drama concluding with the death by beheading that they sought.

These two lessons confront the two central arguments made by advocates of “equal protection” bills: (1) if we really believe the unborn child is a human being, we must prosecute all involved in its demise as we would for any other homicide and (2) this is the only way we can effectively deter women from getting abortions.

Calls for “Equal Protection” Are Growing

So far this year, bills have been introduced in at least twelve states that aim to “abolish” abortion, including changes to the criminal code that would prosecute women who get abortions with murder.² In some states, they could get the death penalty. Advocates of these bills invoke the principle of “equal protection,” the idea that killing an unborn baby is no different from killing anyone else.

Once a fringe position in the pro-life movement, calls to prosecute women for abortion are growing³—and not just from the self-described “Abolitionists” who have long denounced the mainstream incremental approach to protecting unborn children in the law. Former Planned Parenthood manager Abby Johnson, who has a massive online following, is now advocating for these measures in testimony before state legislative committees—and insisting that anyone who opposes them isn’t serious about ending abortion.⁴ In a recent debate at Yale with former Catholics for Choice president Francis Kissling, prominent pro-life personality Lila Rose advocated for criminal penalties for women who get abortions unless they can show they were coerced.⁵

These bills often include moving language about the value of the unborn child that will resonate with all of us in the pro-life movement. And we all share the goal of protecting the lives of these children to the fullest possible extent in the law. But despite the lofty language and good intentions, we must oppose any measure that would prosecute women for abortion.

It’s not just that pursuing these bills is a waste of resources, with even very conservative states like South Carolina and Oklahoma resoundingly rejecting them. Nor is it that the American people overwhelmingly oppose the idea, which conjures the ugliest stereotypes of our movement as vengeful and anti-woman. Prosecuting women isn’t just imprudent—it’s bad policy, and would only serve to shield abortionists from the law and drive their grisly business underground, while causing real harm to the women we claim to serve.

Pre-Roe Laws Targeted Abortionists, Not Women

It would be helpful to review the history of abortion law in the United States. Before Roe v. Wade swept away every state law protecting life in the womb, only a handful of state anti-abortion laws included any provision for prosecuting the woman. Lawmakers realized that the real culprit was the abortionist—the one who kills in cold blood, exploiting a desperate woman for money—and that to catch the abortionist, they would need the woman as a witness. Even when the law allowed for prosecuting the mother, the threat of prosecution was only used to get her to identify the abortionist.⁶

Those early anti-abortion pioneers recognized that women were being exploited by abortionists. They did not consider her innocent of all moral culpability, but still saw her involvement to be fundamentally different from the abortionist’s. They knew that a woman seeking an abortion doesn’t have the mindset of a murderer. As pro-life advocate Frederica Mathewes-Green put it, “No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg.”⁷

There is real wisdom in this understanding—ancient wisdom. As far back as the fourth century, the Council of Ancyra reduced the penance for the sin of abortion from exclusion from communion until the hour of death to exclusion for just ten years. This was the same penance as for involuntary homicide, but half that for murder. And lest we attribute this framing to ancient ignorance about fetal development, St. Basil of Caesarea clarified that this penance applied “whether the embryo were perfectly formed or not.” Ten years: That’s a serious sin. But the ancient church didn’t equate it with murder.⁸

Unwanted Abortion and Mens Rea

Today we have even more reason to see the woman as something other than a cold-blooded killer. After five decades of legal abortion, we know how often women are pressured into abortion by boyfriends, husbands, parents, employers, and others. New peer-reviewed research shows that only one-third of women who had abortions describe them as a free choice, with one in four describing their abortions as unwanted or even coerced. Sixty percent said they would have preferred to give birth if they had received the emotional or financial support they needed.⁹

This helps to explain the palpable ambivalence we hear from women about their abortion decisions, which is grimly on display on the website ShoutYourAbortion.com, launched to destigmatize abortion by allowing women to share their abortion stories. The site is replete with stories of women seeking forgiveness from their unborn children, begging them to...

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