“I would totally go with treating it like any other crime, up to and including hanging.”

That’s how Kevin Williamson, very briefly a columnist at the Atlantic, articulated his views on the proper punishment for women who get abortions in a September 2014 episode of his National Review podcast.

The Atlantic had already come in for some criticism for hiring Williamson; he tweeted in 2014 that “the law should treat abortion like any other homicide” and added that hanging was an appropriate penalty.

Williamson’s defenders had tried to spin the tweet as a one-off aberration, an offhand comment for which the columnist should get a pass, or even a “second chance.” New York Times op-ed columnist Bret Stephens wrote, for instance, that Williamson’s critics “show bad faith when they treat an angry tweet or a flippant turn of phrase as proof of moral incorrigibility.”

Feminists and other reproductive rights advocates were, rightly, outraged. When a pundit tweets that he supports the death penalty for abortion, why not believe him? Why assume he was just being “flippant”?

The surfacing of the podcast brought the debate to a head. Williamson was fired on Thursday, with Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg forced to conclude that his new hire did, in fact, believe what he said he believed. “The language he used in this podcast — and in my conversations with him in recent days — made it clear that the original tweet did, in fact, represent his carefully considered views,” Goldberg reportedly said in a letter to staff.

Williamson will not be able to use the platform of the Atlantic to expand on his views on abortion and hanging. But that doesn’t mean his basic argument — that women should be punished for having abortions — is going away. In fact, Williamson’s statements were never the kind of fluke his defenders claimed. They were statements of a real policy agenda, one shared by some abortion opponents — and one that may be gaining more power in an administration that’s been overwhelmingly supportive of anti-abortion goals.

“For heaven’s sake, it was a tweet”

After the Atlantic announced on March 22 the hiring of Williamson, a former writer for National Review, critics took issue with a number of his past statements. In addition to the abortion comments, he has compared a black child to a “primate,” called trans actress Laverne Cox “an effigy of a woman,” and accused Bernie Sanders of leading a “national-socialist movement,” as Jordan Weissman notes at Slate.

Goldberg defended his decision to hire Williamson in an internal memo to Atlantic staffers, writing that he would “prefer, all things being equal, to give people second chances and the opportunity to change.”

“I’ve done this before in reference to extreme tweeting (third chances, too, on occasion), and I hope to continue this practice,” he continued.

Meanwhile, Stephens, the Times columnist, argued that a single mention of hanging as a penalty for abortion wasn’t enough to get worked up over. “I jumped at your abortion comment, but for heaven’s sake, it was a tweet,” he wrote in a column framed as an open letter to Williamson. “When you write a whole book on the need to execute the tens of millions of American women who’ve had abortions, then I’ll worry.”

“Let he who is without a bad tweet, a crap sentence or even a deplorable opinion cast the first stone,” Stephens added.

Hanging women for having an abortion isn’t a random idea. It’s a real policy proposal.

The podcast comments, highlighted by Media Matters on Wednesday, make it a little harder to dismiss Williamson’s position on abortion as a single bad tweet. What’s more, calling for women to be severely punished for getting abortions is not merely “a flippant turn of phrase.” It’s an actual policy recommendation, endorsed by prominent political figures.

In March 2016, Donald Trump said in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who get abortions. His campaign later issued a statement reversing that position, which stated that in the event of a state or federal abortion ban, “the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman.”

Trump has never been particularly consistent on the subject of abortion, and his response to Matthews seemed at the time like the ill-considered reply of someone who hasn’t thought much about the issue. But his willingness to support punishment for women terminating pregnancies feels significant at a time when multiple state lawmakers are advocating just that.

More recently, Bob Nonini, a state senator from Idaho and candidate for lieutenant governor in the state, said during a candidate forum on Monday that “there should be no abortion and anyone who has an abortion should pay.” When asked if he supported the death penalty for abortion, he nodded, and he confirmed that position in a later interview with the Associated Press.

He appeared to reverse his position a day later, saying in a statement that “prosecutions have always been focused on the abortionist.”

“There is no way a woman would go to jail let alone face the death penalty. The statute alone, the threat of prosecution, would dramatically reduce abortion. That is my goal.”

However, others in Idaho have brought up the idea of prosecuting women, according to the AP. The group Abolish Abortion Idaho is backing a ballot initiative that would charge both women and doctors with first-degree murder in the case of an abortion. Idaho state Sen. Dan Foreman tried to introduce similar legislation last year, but it never got a hearing.

More mainstream anti-abortion groups have generally avoided calls to punish women for getting abortions, instead often casting women as victims whose lives are harmed by the act of ending a pregnancy. However, the Trump administration’s reproductive health policy, which has included an embrace of anti-abortion groups and individuals as well as the appointments of many federal judges considered friendly to the anti-abortion cause, may have emboldened state lawmakers and others to push more punitive legislation.

Related How Trump helped inspire a wave of strict new abortion laws

A bill introduced in Ohio in March would ban all abortions and allow criminal charges against doctors as well as patients who get the procedure. The bill would categorize an abortion as a homicide, meaning doctors and patients could get life in prison or the death penalty, according to NPR.

Williamson may be gone from the Atlantic, but the point of view he espoused is alive and well. Now, as when he was hired, suggesting that women be punished for getting abortions is not an idle speculation or flippant joke. It’s an all-too-real proposal being floated in multiple states, and one that had the support, at least at one point, of the man who is now our president. That’s something no one should forget, no matter what Williamson does next.