'Hellscape': Women increasingly charged with pregnancy-related crimes after Roe’s end

Women are increasingly being charged with pregnancy-related crimes since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that had found a constitutional right to abortion. Abortion bans are playing a role.

A new study, “Pregnancy As a Crime: A Preliminary Report on the First Year After Dobbs,” found 210 cases of pregnancy-related crimes were charged in the first year since the Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court ruling that rescinded the constitutional right to abortion. That is the largest number of cases in any 12-month period since the year Roe v. Wade was decided.

“Most of the cases identified were in just two states: Alabama and Oklahoma,” according to the Associated Press. Essentially half of all cases (104) were charged in just one state: Alabama. Oklahoma ranked second with 68.

“Wendy Bach, a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law and one of the lead researchers on the project, said one of the cases was when a woman delivered a stillborn baby at her home about six or seven months into pregnancy,” the AP reports. “Bach said that when the woman went to make funeral arrangements, the funeral home alerted authorities and the woman was charged with homicide.”

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Mary Ruth Ziegler, a legal historian focusing on abortion at University of California Davis School of Law, told CNN, “Prosecutions of pregnant women for conduct during pregnancy didn’t start with the anti-abortion movement, but they definitely accelerated with the anti-abortion movement.”

Lourdes Rivera, president of Pregnancy Justice, the nonprofit organization that released the study, told the AP, “It’s an environment where pregnancy loss is potentially criminally suspect.”

Rivera, speaking to Jezebel, “said the report’s findings reflect how ‘post-Dobbs, abortion bans have created a chilling effect, an environment for law enforcement to misapply existing criminal laws and the ideology of fetal personhood’ to wrongly criminalize a range of legal behaviors from pregnant people.”

Earlier this year the Republican National Committee released its first new platform in eight years. Some media reports claimed it was “softening” on abortion, and some far-right activists blasted the RNC for that stance. But the new platform included language paving the way for what some call fetal personhood, the belief that human life begins at conception and therefore a fertilized egg is immediately conferred the same civil rights as every other person in America.

CNN reports fetal personhood “is at the root of many of the allegations” examined in the Pregnancy Justice report.

“The goal was not just to have these individual people go to prison, it was meant to set a precedent about what fetal rights look like,” Ziegler said. “So going for the easiest target made sense.”

CNN adds that “the data from June 2022 to June 2023 shows that the vast majority of pregnancy-related charges alleged substance use during pregnancy, according to the new report from Pregnancy Justice. In more than half of the cases, substance use was the only allegation made against the defendant.”

The vast majority of the defendants were low income, and proof that the fetus was actually harmed was not required for most of the 210 charges.

“About half of cases were in Alabama, where residents voted in 2018 to amend the Constitution to include protections for unborn life and where the state Supreme Court ruled in February that frozen embryos are children and those who destroy them can be held liable for wrongful death,” CNN noted.

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“The People of Alabama have declared the public policy of this State to be that unborn human life is sacred,” Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote in his concurring opinion earlier this year. “We believe that each human being, from the moment of conception, is made in the image of God, created by Him to reflect His likeness.”

Pregnancy Justice on social media explained that after the Dobbs decision, “State actors are emboldened, putting pregnant people under INCREASED surveillance and making a dire situation even worse.”

Dr. Norman Ornstein, a political scientist, senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, and contributing editor for the Atlantic weighed in on Alabama Public Radio’s report from the Associated Press.

“Alabama. Elected Tommy Tuberville. Katie Britt. Kay Ivey. A Hellscape of racism and cruelty,” Ornstein wrote, referring to the state’s Republican freshmen U.S. Senators and longtime Republican governor.