The July meeting of the Cleveland County Republican Party grew heated. The topic was abortion.
Kari Rayl, a nutritionist and health practitioner who served as chair of Precinct 345, had returned to address the executive committee after being removed. That event grew out of a personal conflict between her and longtime member Gary Barksdale, an instructor in the University of Oklahoma's math department.
In addition to an intense and personal argument taking place during the meeting, Rayl's position on abortion became front and center. She found herself pitted against The Abolitionists, a fast-growing splinter group now assuming control of Oklahoma's Republican Party.
Rayl acknowledged the personal issues being aired but also underscored her beliefs about abortion; Plan B, a contraceptive, also called the morning-after pill, is not an abortion pill.
"We have a couple people in our group that are adamant," she told them. "Women must be incarcerated if they use the morning after pill at 15 because they were raped or if their baby dies inside of them. They've just gone way too far and as a Republican and a conservative that acts in grace, I won't be swayed to act this way."
Barksdale, now a committeeman in the statewide party, could not hide his outrage over the personal remarks, nor the abortion stance. He decried a post in which he said Rayl was pressuring other Republicans to back off on the abortion issue.
“Abortion is fundamentally the pillar upon which we have to build all of our values because it is the value of life and those values are reflected in our first value and our last platform plank,” Barksdale said. ”We even passed the resolution unanimously as an abolition vow.”
The debate went on, but Rayl was out. The Abolitionist movement was in. In that belief, women who have an abortion are to be prosecuted for murder. Targets could include those who take contraceptives, including birth control pills and Plan B.
The faction is growing successfully in local and state races, and is pushing anti-abortion legislation to further extremes.
“Well, it has become a force,” Barksdale told Oklahoma Watch later. “In fact, our state chairwoman and our state vice chairman are both members of the abolitionist movement.”
Republican State Chairwoman Charity Linch did not return repeated requests for an interview.
“It’s like The Handmaid’s Tale,” Rayl told Oklahoma Watch. “It’s getting scary.”
Murder and retribution
Barksdale explained why contraceptives like Plan B are in the crosshairs of his group.
“Because that is a thing that obstructs the development of a fertilized egg, the development of a human being from the moment of fertilization,” Barksdale said. “We don't even want anything like that made available.”
The group, which started in Oklahoma, goes beyond the traditional pro-life movement, seeking to punish any woman who ends her pregnancy as a murderer, according to State Senator Dusty Deevers, R-Elgin.
“It is the death of a child,” Deevers said. “So an abortion is prenatal homicide. The intent is for the mother to kill her own preborn child and whatever other actors were involved, there was an intent to kill a preborn child.”
In 2025, Deevers presented a bill in the state legislature to declare that pregnancy should be considered with the same lens as someone who is born, and that any procedure, pill, or substance that interferes with a woman's fertilized egg would be a form of murder. Anything to prevent that fertilized egg from being carried to term would require investigation by law enforcement.
“Enforcement where the victim is an unborn child is subject to the same presumptions, defenses, justifications, laws of parties, immunities, and clemencies as would apply when the victim is a person who had been born alive,” the bill stated. “Even where the charge is murder, the provisions of this section shall apply if the victim is an unborn child and the defendant is the child’s mother.”
Deevers’ bill did not pass out of the Senate’s judiciary committee, failing with a bipartisan vote of 6-2.
"I don't see Christ in your bill," state Senator Todd Gollihare, R-Kellyville, said before the vote. "I heard the Old Testament loud and clear, an eye for an eye, but I do not see Christ in your bill."
Deevers defended the bill.
”It would've given equal protection under the law for preborn children from the moment of conception, which is fertilization,” said Deevers, who is the pastor of Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Elgin. “It would've fulfilled the golden rule towards them.”
He said his bill would mean a murder investigation for any woman suspected of stopping her pregnancy by any means, whether leaving the state for an abortion in a state where it is legal, which he called abortion tourism, or by a pill, or from any other means.
“Life begins at conception, which is fertilization,” Deevers said. “There are going to be cases just like any other case. Where there's an alleged crime, there will be an investigation, and fact-finding evidence and have to determine whether that's happened or not. And they will use labs and whatever evidence available to them, DNA evidence.”
As for those Republicans who voted against Deevers’ bill, they will also face retribution, according to Barksdale.
”We've already coined them as the Unfavorable Four, the four committee members that blocked Deevers' abolition bill,” Barksdale said. “The state GOP actually censured the Unfavorable Four.”
The Oklahoma Republican Party’s resolution states that opposing the abolitionist’s view is “so great an injustice and so great a violation of the Word of God and the OKGOP platform that the Oklahoma Republican Party encourages Republicans in Oklahoma to withhold all support from their political careers,” naming those who voted against Deevers, including Gollihare.
Activist Rachel Burkey, who has been active in the movement in Oklahoma, said that was part of the abolitionists’ strategy.
“You're putting a target on your back to oppose abolition, and so we're going to try to primary you, we're going to end your political career as much as we can,” Burkey said. “That is where our efforts lie.”
Following his senate confrontation with Deevers, activists in Sapulpa showed up at Sen. Gollihare’s church, reportedly disrupting the congregation before a service and demanding that the pastor decry Gollihare’s vote against Deevers’ bill. According to Gollihare’s account in Oklahoma Voice, the protestors told the pastor he and the church were demonic and called a woman a witch. They also harassed people entering the service, the report states.
This session Gollihare presented Senate Bill 743, which outlaws disrupting religious services. The bill passed in February.
The mechanism of movement
Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, Burkey said the most distinct leg of the movement started in Norman, which has led to growth both statewide and nationally. She said the group strongly pushes the Republican Party to go beyond pro-life. She said the 2018 candidacy of Dan Fisher for governor was a catalyst for the movement as Fisher adopted their stance, even though he finished fourth in a 10-candidate primary.
“And ever since then the Lord used his run for office to open up a lot of eyes about the difference between pro-life and abolition,” she said.
Burkey said the movement differentiates itself from those who identify as pro-life because that movement has lost its way and ends up advocating for abortion by having exceptions, she said, adding that 100% of abortions are murder. She decried the use of lobbyists and politics to bring about a complete end to abortions, which she called scheming. Being pro-life is not enough.
“Abolitionists look at the pro-life quote-unquote bans; we would do air quotes around them and say you actually haven't abolished it yet, because the practice of child sacrifice is happening rampantly as long as it's the mother doing it,” she said. “The reason for that is all these pro-life bills are just a never ending cycle of doing nothing because they're never achieving justice, they're never treating abortion, they're never criminalizing abortion as murder.”
Burkey said the estimated 4,000 women who left Oklahoma in 2023 to get an abortion are all guilty of murder but are protected under the law. Under an abolitionist state law, women could face an investigation, trial, and possibly life in prison or the death penalty for getting an abortion out of state, or for taking Plan B. However, she said, such a law would not be retroactive, and there would not be a sweep of women who in the past had gotten abortions.
“No law can be enacted retroactively,’ Burkey said. “There are no ex-post-facto laws. So if you're asking me, are abolitionists trying to have Nuremberg trials? The answer is no.”
She said the movement is far too busy right now targeting those politicians who are trying to hold back such laws from going forward. “We're all about actually making politicians fear,” she said. “Ultimately what they need to do is they need to fear God. But if you're gonna fear men, you should fear the abolitionist movement because we are growing. We're growing because the abolitionist movement is led by Jesus Christ.”
They were always there
Rachel Blum, an associate professor in the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center at the University of Oklahoma, said she had not heard of Oklahoma’s abolitionist movement yet, but, she said, those with such beliefs have always been part of the pro-life movement.
“I grew up in the Evangelical church,” Blum said. “There was always this group in there.”
In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. that the company could claim religious exemption and not provide certain forms of birth control under the requirements for the Affordable Care Act. Such a decision made the abolitionist movement much more likely, she said, possibly giving a starting point. But another major turning point was overturning Roe v. Wade, she said.
Strict ideological movements often split when they become successful, she said. After decades of battling Roe v. Wade in state after state, in presidential elections, in U.S. Senate battles over candidates for the U.S. Supreme Court, the pro-life movement finally succeeded in overturning the precedent. The 1973 decision that gave women the right to have an abortion was overturned in 2022.
”This really only happens when a coalition starts to win,” Blum said. “This is when all this gets exposed, the difference between the people who are trying to figure out how to legislate in the real world and the people who view this as a, like, all-or-nothing moral cause.”
Blum’s book, “How the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics,” mapped how such a splinter group gained considerable traction in the GOP, such that it pushed the party further to the right. The faction can bring the rest of the party in line by attacking their own, rather than running against Democrats.
”It does not surprise me that this is their strategy, although they didn't come up with it,” Blum said. “The Tea Party did this constantly. These ideological primary challenges were not very common until 2010 or so; before then the only reason you would primary an incumbent was a scandal. The Tea Party pioneered this strategy of partisan infighting …. They were perfectly fine losing a seat in a general election if it meant pushing the Republican party in a different direction.”
Boots on the ground
State Senator Mary Boren, D-Norman, was one of two senators who seconded Deevers’ bill before the judiciary committee in 2025. She later said it was because she wanted to pin the Republicans to the task, to make them vote for it, up or down. And it failed to pass.
But she said she has no illusions that the abolitionists are going away. In fact, she said, they are growing in strength at the Capitol.
“They can succeed at criminalizing abortion, Plan B, and birth control pills,” Boren said. “They are running candidates to defeat incumbent Republicans. If enough of their candidates win, and their incumbents aren’t defeated, then they can take over leadership in the Senate and the House. The margin is thin.”
It’s happening nationally, too. Abolitionists were handed a victory Friday when a federal appeals court in New Orleans blocked the mailing of prescriptions of mifepristone, one of the drugs used for ending pregnancy. The court ruled that the abortion pill be distributed only in person at clinics. That was overturned on Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court restored broad access to the abortion pill mifepristone. The order signed by Justice Samuel Alito temporarily allows women seeking abortions to obtain the pill at pharmacies or through the mail, without an in-person visit to a doctor.
The Oklahoma State Senate passed House Bill 1168, which outlaws the distribution of abortion-inducing drugs, naming misoprostol (Cytotec) and methotrexate. The bill had been making its way through the legislature since at least 2024, and calls for anyone providing the drugs to women to be guilty of a felony, fined $100,000, and face a prison sentence of 10 years. The bill states that it does not prohibit the use of preventive contraceptives when used in accordance with the manufacturer's instructions. The measure now goes to Governor Kevin Stitt’s desk.
For Burkey, such a bill does not go far enough, because it does not hold the pregnant woman responsible for trying to end her pregnancy.
“I would lobby against a bill that bans all abortion pills or abortion pill sales,” she said. “You don't ban guns to stop school shooters. You criminalize the act of murder. And so no one in the pro-life movement, no pro-life legislation, is actually criminalizing the act of murder as homicide.”
Blum said the abolitionist movement, in the end, is about who has control.
“The real thing with these abortion measures isn't about babies,” Blum said. “It's about controlling women because certain types of women are, you know, feminist career women.”
The partisan’s tale
Opponents of the abolitionists in Norman celebrated a recent victory over an abolitionist-backed candidate for city council.
Trey Kirby, who was a precinct chair until the row over Rayl’s departure, faced off against Dianna Hutzel. Hutzel was backed strongly by the abolitionists, according to Barksdale. Although Hutzel’s campaign outspent Kirby’s by as much as 7-1 by his estimate, Kirby won the ostensibly non-partisan seat on the council. He said he was astonished by how virulent members of the movement were against Rayl.
“If they could have strung her up from a tree, they would have,” he said. “That's how much hate you could just see in it. And how are you calling yourself pro-life when you're literally willing to take a mom's life and put them in prison or something if they don't do exactly what you want?”
Kirby said he felt like the movement was targeting women, not just trying to protect unborn children.
“It's almost like ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ with this group,” he said. “They have no respect for women. Multiple ones I've heard saying how we should have taken away the constitutional amendment that even gave women the right to vote. I have a wife and a daughter and a granddaughter and a mom and friends and you, you don't ever talk to women that way.”
Barksdale said they supported Kirby’s opponent because she agreed with their platform, that abortion is murder and that women seeking one should face the justice system.
”What we will do is we will endorse those that support our platform,” he said. “And that's why at the state level as well as the county level we ask all, anybody that runs as a Republican, to go and mark up our platform, right?”
Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.
