Beseeching Americans to vote Democratic, California Rep. Eric Swalwell used a provocative ad on abortion to attack Make America Great Again Republicans, those who have an allegiance to former President Donald Trump.

Swalwell, who ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, introduced the digital ad with a tweet that made this claim:

"MAGA Republicans want women arrested for having an abortion."

The 90-second video, titled "Lock Her Up," depicts a dystopian scene. A woman, man and two young children are having a peaceful dinner at home when they see flashing lights and hear a knock at their front door. The woman answers and two male police officers arrest her as the children and the man look on. 

The officers tell the woman she’s being arrested for "unlawful termination of a pregnancy." One officer tells her that her doctor is in custody and that she will have to undergo a physical examination. The officers draw handguns on the man when he objects and moves toward them. 

"We’re just enforcing the law here," one officer says while handcuffing the woman and putting her into a squad car.

The ad then pivots to a get-out-the-vote message: "Elections have consequences," a narrator says. "Vote Democrat on November 8th. Stop Republicans from criminalizing abortion everywhere. Protect women’s rights and freedom."

The meaning of MAGA — Trump’s trademark Make America Great Again 2016 campaign slogan — is subject to interpretation. At the least, MAGA Republicans are supporters of Trump. But with a claim this sweeping, it’s difficult to quantify who might qualify as being in this category and who does not. Nor can we pinpoint what all the folks in this category "want." 

But we can provide context about what some Republicans who support Trump have said and done with regard to this issue.

A legal expert and abortion-rights supporters told PolitiFact that there are no current federal or state laws or pending legislation to arrest women for obtaining an abortion, but that they expect such legislative proposals to be forthcoming.

Some Republican state lawmakers have already proposed such laws. And existing laws in some states are vague about whether women could be arrested for getting illegal abortions, potentially giving discretion to local officials.

The movement to criminalize abortion "is not the mainstream yet, but it’s also not irrelevant in the way it was a few years ago," said University of California, Davis law professor Mary Ziegler, an abortion historian. Its supporters "are not running the show yet, but they have a seat at the table in a way that they didn’t have a little while ago."

Emails to Swalwell’s campaign and emails and a call to his House office yielded no responses.

In an MSNBC interview about his ad, Swalwell, who is heavily favored to win re-election to a sixth term, said: "As a former prosecutor, when I looked at the Republicans’ abortion laws, criminalizing abortion, mandating pregnancy, I thought through, well, what is this going to look like as it plays out across America, and it’s that scene right there."

T.W. Arrighi, spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told PolitiFact that Swalwell’s statement is "blatantly false." He didn’t provide information to rebut the claim.

Trump, while campaigning for president in 2016, said at a Wisconsin town hall that women should face "some form of punishment" for having an abortion. The next day, his campaign said Trump meant that if abortion were outlawed, doctors who perform abortions should be punished.

Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee for the open governor’s seat in that swing state, said during the primary campaign that he wants to end abortion completely and doesn’t support exceptions to allow abortion under certain circumstances, such as rape or incest.

In September, news reports revealed that Mastriano said in 2019 that women should be charged with murder if they violated legislation he proposed at the time that would have outlawed abortion at about six weeks of pregnancy. 

In May, the National Republican Senatorial Committee issued a memo highlighting opinion poll research on abortion. It advised Republicans to show compassion for pregnant women. The committee, chaired by Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., wrote that Republicans don’t want to throw women in jail and "mothers should be held harmless under the law."

Scott was one of seven senators who challenged the Electoral College results that showed Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020, but Scott has since stated that he believes Biden was legitimately elected.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., in September introduced legislation that would federally ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The measure included criminal penalties of up to five years imprisonment for abortion providers, but it also said, "a woman upon whom an abortion … is performed or attempted may not be prosecuted."

Graham has called Trump "the most flawed nominee in the history of the Republican Party" in 2016, but later became a staunch Trump ally. 

Some states that have banned abortion have laws that explicitly say women who have abortions are not to be arrested or prosecuted; others don’t. 

For example, what is known as Georgia’s "heartbeat" law does not prohibit investigations of women who get illegal abortions. So some legal experts believe women could be investigated if there are questions about whether their pregnancies ended in a miscarriage or an illegal abortion. That leaves open the possibility of local law enforcement officers or prosecutors having discretion to investigate women, Ziegler, the law professor, said.

GOP sponsors of the 2019 Georgia measure included Trump-supporting state Reps. Josh Bonner, Micah Gravley and Ginny Ehrhart.

Some Trump-supporting Republican state lawmakers have introduced measures that, if they had become law, would have  subjected women to criminal penalties. 

Some examples:

In 2021, Texas state Rep. Bryan Slaton introduced a bill that would have criminalized abortion as homicide, punishable by death, for women who have abortions. Slaton, who introduced legislation to finish a portion of a Texas-Mexico border wall and name it after Trump, has pledged to reintroduce the abortion bill. 

In the same year in Arizona, 10 state representatives introduced a bill to do the same thing. Among the lawmakers sponsoring the Arizona bill were Trump-supporting state Reps. Walt Blackman and Shawnna Bolick. Bolick said she would not have certified Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump in Arizona.

In March 2022, Trump supporter and Louisiana state Rep. Danny McCormick introduced a bill that would have subjected Louisiana women to murder charges for having abortions. 

In January 2021, McCormick signed a letter asking Louisiana's Republican congressmen to reject Biden's electors from six swing states.

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