Police responded to a call that a pregnant woman was overdosing. When they arrived, they administered Narcan, the life-saving drug that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. Afterward, they charged the woman with “abuse” of her “unborn child,” according to documents obtained by Pregnancy Justice.
This is one of 210 examples of pregnancy criminalization the nonprofit organization has documented in a report released last week that tracks police investigation and criminal court files involving pregnant people in the year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs decision. A previous report from the nonprofit organization showed that more and more pregnant people were being charged in the decades leading up to Dobbs. The year since saw the highest number of prosecutions the research team has documented in a single year, report co-author Wendy Bach told Salon.
“The report shows how pregnant people are really under increased surveillance in all kinds of ways, in particular when there’s a pregnancy loss,” Bach said in a video call.
The majority of cases documented in the report involved general criminal laws used to prosecute pregnant people. Ninety percent of charges were for some form of child abuse, neglect or endangerment wile 86% of cases did not require prosecutors to find evidence of harm to the fetus. Instead, these charges could be handed down if the defendant was judged to put the embryo or fetus at risk, noted Maya Manian, a law professor at American University who specializes in healthcare and reproductive rights.
“It just makes it easier to bring that charge and criminalize a person for their behavior during pregnancy,” Manian told Salon in a phone interview.
“The report shows how pregnant people are really under increased surveillance in all kinds of ways, in particular when there’s a pregnancy loss.”
Only one charge involved an abortion-specific crime under a now-repealed statute, and the remaining included criminal homicide, drug charges, and one charge of “abuse of a corpse.” While the reproductive rights movement is often centered around abortion, the distribution of these court cases shows how expansive the legislation restricting pregnant people’s reproductive rights enacted over the past several decades, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis and author of various books detailing the history of U.S. abortion.
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“What [anti-abortion groups] want to do is write the idea that a fetus is a person into as many laws and as many contexts as possible to eventually say to the ultra-conservative Supreme Court, ‘Isn’t it weird that a fetus isn’t a person in this other context?’” Ziegler told Salon in a phone interview. “Each prosecution, in a way, is a sort of break in the wall of building toward that national ban.”
The interconnectedness of the carceral system and the health care system in the context of reproductive rights can be traced back to the persecution of Black midwives in the South in the early 1900s,