The criminalization of pregnancy has already been happening to the poor and women of color. | via NPR
"Black women who suffered from stillbirths, Black women who had alerted their doctors that they suffered through addiction were being policed, were being stigmatized and ultimately were being arrested," Goodwin says."Whether they had healthy births or whether they had a miscarriage."
This kind of disproportionate targeting of women of color continues to this day, and stretches back far into the past. These laws often were passed under the auspices of protecting pregnant women, especially from domestic violence. There's no arguing that people who are pregnant need protection. In the United Statesamong pregnant women. But the feticide laws didn't work to make pregnant people safer, says Dana Sussman, acting executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, known as NAPW.
They are currently representing Brittney Pullow, a member of the Wichita Tribe, who was convicted of manslaughter last year for having a miscarriage when she was somewhere between 15 and 17 weeks pregnant. The state of Oklahoma faulted the miscarriage on methampetamine use, without scientific support.
The same holds true for drug use, which on its own is also not a crime in most states. It is the person's status as pregnant that changes that, that makes you vulnerable, Sussman says."All of a sudden, the state can charge you with crimes that do not exist if you were not pregnant." "We have weaponized the state to get involved in so many aspects of our lives that were just not present in 1973," she says about the year Roe made abortion legal."The apparatus of mass incarceration and criminalization and the funding to support it did not exist in 1973."
"The vast majority of miscarriages have no known cause," she says."They're often unexplained genetic abnormalities. There is nothing that the pregnant person could have done or not done to have changed that outcome."
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