On a recent Friday morning, John Andrade stood outside Planned Parenthood in Portland. Next to him was a sign that juxtaposed an X-ray of a man in shackles with an X-ray of a fetus, reading: “The world dehumanizes people in order to justify their destruction.”

Andrade has been preaching against abortion for six years, and in that time has increasingly adopted a more radical position, one in which proponents argue abortion must be abolished the way slavery was. 

“There’s no other subgroup of the population who it is completely legal and permissible to kill,” Andrade said in an interview with The Maine Monitor.

In August, Andrade was sued by the state for violating the Maine Civil Rights Act, for allegedly interfering with the safe delivery of health services by making too much noise outside the building. Since then, he has continued to protest regularly at the same location. He did not have a microphone or amplifier on the recent Friday he was outside the building, but the Office of the Maine Attorney General says he has continued to use them since the lawsuit was filed.

The state successfully brought a similar lawsuit against a man who protested outside the same Planned Parenthood in 2015. In that case, though, a judge rejected the state’s request to bar the man from coming within 50 feet of the facility. 

In Andrade’s case, the attorney general’s office is seeking to bar him from coming within 150 feet of any Planned Parenthood facility. In an email to The Monitor, the attorney general’s office wrote that the 150-foot buffer was necessary to prevent Andrade from “being sufficiently close to a facility such that he can interfere with the delivery of health care services” but declined to specify why the restriction was warranted in this case despite a similar restriction being rejected in 2015.

Andrade is being represented by the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative legal organization. In a response to the complaint, Andrade’s lawyers argued that the noise statute in the Maine Civil Rights Act is unconstitutional because it considers the content of violators’ speech in determining whether they interfere with health services.

In a statement to The Monitor, vice president of public affairs for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England Lisa Margulies wrote that the organization was grateful to Attorney General Aaron Frey “for taking action to protect patients from harassment and intimidation as they seek access to health care.”

Andrade was one of the founding members of King’s Coalition for Abolition, an informal Maine group that pushes for the criminalization of abortion. Though the group is small, it has had an impact at the State House, pushing for an extreme anti-abortion bill that aimed to criminalize abortion for providers and patients alike.

The bill was pulled by its sponsor earlier this year before it went to the floor, but members of the group are hoping to put forward similar legislation in the future.

SHIFTING RHETORIC

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in its 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision, a number of anti-abortion groups have latched onto abolitionist rhetoric, advocating against incremental approaches in favor of total bans that would charge those who get abortions with murder.

While some mainstream anti-abortion organizations frame the debate as offering constitutional or civil rights protections to unborn children, the abolitionist movement is explicitly religious, and its rhetoric is spreading.

According to KFF, a nonprofit health policy organization, 12 states now ban abortion. The legal consequences center on abortion providers and not pregnant people, but Maine was one of a dozen states to introduce legislation this year that would have changed that.

Josh Whitney, a leader in King’s Coalition, said the group has around seven organizers and a half dozen partner churches and pastors who spread abolitionist ideas to their congregations. Whitney said the group has no official affiliation with national organizations, nor does it receive funding from them.

He said he pays $90 per month to maintain the group’s website, and most people who preach or protest with the group use their own signs and pamphlets. The group doesn’t have nonprofit status, so donations aren’t tax deductible, and while the website mentions financial support as a way to get involved, there is no link to donate. 

The group, originally called Unborn Lives Matter, was founded in 2023 after the Maine Legislature passed a law expanding abortion access. Today, people in Maine can receive abortion services with no waiting period up to the point of viability, or after the point of viability when deemed necessary by a licensed physician.

Joel Littlefield, senior pastor of the Southern Baptist New City Church in Bath, said that while he used to describe himself as pro-life, King’s Coalition and national abolition groups exposed him to a new way of thinking about abortion.

“If we are Christians and we believe the scriptures are true, then that little baby from the smallest point is a human baby,” Littlefield said. “Therefore, if its life is taken or snuffed out, then somebody should be held responsible.”

For Littlefield, that goes beyond pregnant people themselves to include fathers and others who encourage or materially support abortions.

Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who specializes in reproductive law and history, said the abolitionist movement’s push for criminalization is deeply unpopular among the broader public. Even in states like Texas with total abortion bans, Ziegler said charging women who get abortions with murder remains a political nonstarter, but the movement still influences public opinion.

“They’re playing the long game,” Ziegler said. “If you look at how they have worked in places like Texas and Oklahoma, it’s not by getting their own bills passed. It’s by forcing the pro-life movement to change its bills … It’s making what seems to be kind of mainstream for the pro-life movement different.”

Even though some anti-abortion organizations shy away from religious rhetoric, Ray Vensel, president of the Maine chapter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said the debate can only be understood in a religious context. He said he has noticed an uptick in religiously charged abortion rhetoric since the Dobbs decision, with one Republican representative suggesting that the 2023 Lewiston shooting was God’s response to a law that expanded abortion access in the state.

LEGISLATIVE EFFORTS

Earlier this year, Maine lawmakers considered seven bills that would have regulated various aspects of abortion, from updating informed consent guidance to addressing the disposal of abortion drugs. King’s Coalition was integral in bringing the most extreme bill, L.D. 975, to the Legislature, though it ultimately died in committee.

The bill would have criminalized abortion by defining human life as starting at conception within Maine’s criminal code. Unlike other bills aimed at regulating abortion this year, L.D. 975 didn’t make it out of the Judiciary Committee. Representative Abigail Griffin, R-Levant, who sponsored the bill, wrote a letter requesting that the committee unanimously vote against passage to prevent it from going to a floor vote days before the hearing.

Griffin did not explain her reasoning in the letter beyond writing, “I recognize the complexity of this issue and the diverse perspectives of my colleagues and constituents.” She did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Whitney believes Republican leadership opposed the bill because it may have cost the party seats in the next election, noting that he was told by a staffer that voting in support of the bill would have been “political suicide.” House and Senate Republican leadership did not respond to requests for comment.

King’s Coalition plans to focus on outreach efforts on college campuses and at clinics in the coming years. If the organization is successful in introducing another abolition bill, Whitney said it would likely be very similar to L.D. 975.

Mike McClellan, a former representative and executive director of Maine Right to Life, said he told Griffin directly that he would either not testify at all or testify against L.D. 975.

Beyond his opposition to prosecuting women who have abortions, McClellan said the bill had no path to passing and would only galvanize the abortion-rights movement because of its extreme perspective. McClellan noted that the push to overturn Roe v. Wade took 50 years to materialize, and he sees the path to eliminating abortions in Maine as similarly incremental.

“I have to live in reality,” McClellan said. “I mean, my two thoughts on the bill were one, the votes aren’t there … and secondly …why do you want to aggravate somebody just to aggravate somebody? It’s not smart.”

Grace Howard, an associate professor at San Jose State University who focuses on reproductive justice, said she believes the abortion abolitionists are co-opting the terminology of the anti-slavery movement in a problematic way, pointing to anti-abortion groups’ past targeting of Black mothers. While anti-abortion and abolitionist activists may use different rhetoric, she said, the impact on access to abortion services is the same. 

Even in states with carveouts for rape, incest and the life of the mother, Howard said those exceptions don’t always work. Reporting by ProPublica has found that abortion bans with exceptions for the life of the mother have still caused preventable deaths because they restrict access and cause confusion at health facilities.

The gradual approach also faces less backlash, Howard said, comparing it to a series of paper cuts.

“I see the incremental approach as the most dangerous,” Howard said. “Most people, they get used to the idea of little cuts, and it feels normal, whereas if you do something big and dramatic, people might really freak out.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated Oct. 6 to reflect the attorney general’s claim that Andrade continues to use an amplifier at his protest and to clarify Maine’s abortion law.

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.