Criminalization of Pregnancy Has Already Been Happening

How do abortion bans criminalize pregnant people?

According to Pregnancy Justice (formerly known as the National Advocates for Pregnant Women), pregnant women have been charged, arrested, or detailed more than 1,700 times since 1973. This article by Sandhya Dirks discusses the laws and policies that criminalize pregnant people.

The policing of pregnant women of color first intensified in the 1980s and 1990s. During the war on drugs, pregnant Black women were reported to law enforcement and social services ten times more often than white women. In South Carolina in 1989, for instance, police used non-consensual drug test results to arrest twenty-nine Black women for child abuse.

“Feticide” laws make it a crime to harm a fetus at any stage of a pregnancy. These laws have not fulfilled their initial justification: protecting pregnant women from domestic violence. They declare attempted suicide and other actions illegal only in the case of pregnancy. They cast suspicion on natural miscarriages and still births. With no medical way to tell self-managed abortion apart from miscarriage, feticide laws lead to prosecutions of women for pregnancy loss.

The risks of surveillance and criminalization have grown ever greater, with the rise of mass incarceration and the overturning of Roe v Wade. Abortion bans give police more power to monitor and punish pregnant bodies.

It's going to be poor people, people of color, young people. Anyone who is experiencing a mental health crisis, anyone who has a substance-use disorder, those are the people that are gonna be most vulnerable to suspicion and the specter of law enforcement when they experience a pregnancy loss.

SOURCE: NPR • AUTHOR: Sandhya Dirks • LAST UPDATED: August 3, 2022