At least 210 Women faced criminal charges related to pregnancy, miscarriage, pregnancy loss or childbirth in the year after the Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion, according to a new report from the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice. In most cases — 121 of 210 — the information later used against the women was obtained or disclosed in a medical setting, the researchers found.
The report’s authors said the period examined — from June 2022, when the court’s ruling was issued, to June 2023 — represented the highest number of pregnancy-related crimes in U.S. history. The preliminary report is part of a three-year study of the criminalization of pregnancy in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling. Dobs Resolution: The organization is working in partnership with researchers from the University of Tennessee, the University of South Carolina, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Alabama.
Most of the cases involved allegations of drug use during pregnancy, including 86 cases involving marijuana use. Five cases involved allegations of seeking, mentioning, or attempting to have an abortion.
Nearly half of the prosecutions—104 of them—took place in Alabama, where abortion is almost entirely prohibited and fetal personhood is enshrined as a matter of law. Rolling Stone The implications of Alabama’s adoption of fetal personhood on the criminalization of pregnancy, access to IVF, and abortion administration were documented in June.
Oklahoma ranks second and third in the number of cases, with 68, and South Carolina 10. Both states have personal status laws and a near-total ban on abortion. They are followed by Ohio (7), Mississippi (6), and Texas (6).
Between 1973, when Roe v. Wade The law became law across the United States, and in 2022, when it was struck down by a conservative majority, researchers documented 1,800 cases of pregnancy-related criminalization.
The researchers cautioned that while the 210 figure is the highest they have seen in any year dating back to 1973, it also represents a lower number of cases, as they continued to “detect additional cases that began during” the following year. Roe The decision, which was not included in this initial analysis, has been overturned. They plan to release a more comprehensive report covering the three-year period following the court’s decision.
In a statement, Lourdes Rivera, president of Pregnancy Justice, said the report showed that the Supreme Court ruling “has encouraged prosecutors to develop more aggressive strategies to prosecute pregnancy.” Rivera added that the sharp rise in prosecutions “is directly linked to the extreme legal principle of ‘fetal personhood,’ which grants full legal rights to fetuses, turning them into victims of crimes committed by pregnant women.”
Pregnancy criminalization is not limited to conservative states—researchers have documented at least one case afterRoe The prosecution is in California — and could become a national issue if the GOP wins in November.
like Rolling Stone Recognizing fetal personhood has been an explicit policy goal of the national Republican Party since the 1980s, as we reported earlier this year. The Republican Party platform called for amending the U.S. Constitution to recognize fetal rights, and congressional representatives have introduced legislation that would recognize that life begins at hundreds of conceptions—until the current session, when the Life at Conception Act attracted co-sponsorship from 127 Republican members of Congress.
The Republican Party affirmed this position in its most recent party platform, which was approved in July of this year.
