Kathryn Joyce, investigative reporter for Salon, reports that Doug Mastriano, Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania, believes that abortion is murder. Mastriano is a far-right MAGA guy. Mastriano is not alone.

In an alarming article, Joyce shows the dangers of a growing movement to criminalize women who get abortions.

She writes:

This week, an old interview surfaced of Republican Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano calling for people who have abortions to be prosecuted for murder. The comments came from a 2019 radio interview in which Mastriano was asked whether a “fetal heartbeat” bill he’d sponsored in the state Senate, which would have banned abortion after six weeks, would mean that anyone who obtained abortion after that point in pregnancy should be charged with murder.

“Let’s go back to the basic question there,” Mastriano replied. “Is that a human being? Is that a little boy or girl? If it is, it deserves equal protection under the law.” When the interviewer asked whether that meant he was calling to prosecute abortion as murder, Mastriano removed all doubt, saying, “Yes, I am…”

That may or may not be true, but Mastriano certainly isn’t the only Republican who’s raised the possibility of charging women who have abortions with murder. And not all those Republicans mirror Mastriano’s far-right track record or his lengthy association with extreme elements of Christian nationalism.

In May, just days after news broke about the Supreme Court draft opinion that would ultimately overturn Roe v. Wade, Republican state legislators in Louisiana advanced a bill out of committee that would have classified abortion as homicide, allowing prosecutors to charge anyone who obtained one with murder. The so-called “Abolition of Abortion” act would have “ensure[d] the right to life and equal protection of the laws to all unborn children from the moment of fertilization by protecting them by the same laws protecting other human beings.” In other words, the laws and criminal penalties that apply to homicide would be extended to fetuses as well….

In the larger national picture, women are already being prosecuted for murder and other felonies, both for abortions and for other pregnancy outcomes, including miscarriages and stillbirths.

“Unfortunately we don’t need to criminalize abortion to charge women,” said Purvaja Kavattur, a research and program associate at National Advocates for Pregnant Women, who said that the success of the “fetal personhood” movement — which holds that embryos and fetuses should have the same rights as “already born” people — has led to a sharp increase in prosecutions related to pregnancy.

The U.S. has the worst prenatal care of any developed nation. The new anti-abortion laws will frighten pregnant women away from medical care.