The ‘Pregnancy Police’ Have been Round Lengthy Earlier than Roe v. Wade Fell

For many years, pregnant individuals have been arrested, charged with numerous crimes and jailed for his or her being pregnant outcomes.

A 27-year-old white girl from Tennessee tried suicide whereas pregnant in 1986. She survived, however the fetus was stillborn. She was arrested, charged with legal abortion and held on a $5,000 bond. She pleaded not responsible for causes of madness.

In 1999, Regina McKnight, a 22-year-old Black girl from South Carolina, gave delivery to a five-pound stillborn child. McKnight was drug examined after the delivery and arrested within the hospital for “homicide by child abuse” as a result of she examined optimistic for cocaine. Though it was not conclusive that the reason for the stillbirth was as a result of her drug use, McKnight was sentenced to twenty years in jail after the jury deliberated for less than quarter-hour.

Gabriela Flores, a 22-year-old girl from Mexico, managed her personal abortion utilizing drugs in 2004 in South Carolina as a result of she couldn’t afford a fourth little one or the $700 in-clinic abortion on the $1.50 an hour she earned choosing lettuce. Her neighbor came upon about her abortion and known as the cops, who initially needed to cost Flores with murder and search the loss of life penalty. Flores finally pleaded responsible to an unlawful abortion and spent a complete of seven months in jail.

These are only a few of the tales included in Grace E. Howard’s new e book, “The Pregnancy Police: Conceiving Crime, Arresting Personhood,” during which she analyzes 1,116 pregnancy-related arrests that occurred between 1973 and 2022 in Tennessee, South Carolina and Alabama. Though the circumstances fluctuate from self-managed abortion to substance use and miscarriage, every individual was arrested for crimes towards their very own being pregnant.

“The criminal prosecution of pregnant people for crimes against the fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses they carry relies on a legal understanding that pregnant people occupy a different, lower space in the United States’ system of law,” Howard, who makes use of she/they pronouns, writes in her e book.

Howard, an affiliate professor of justice research at San Jose State College, traces pregnancy-related prosecutions all through historical past, particularly highlighting the intersections between drug use, race and sophistication.

“We’ve been taking rights away from folks because of their pregnancies, but we haven’t been naming it,” they instructed HuffPost. “What I try to do in the book is to trace out the places where pregnancy has been considered an exception to the norms.”

HuffPost spoke with Howard by cellphone about being pregnant criminalization all through historical past, and the way the risk is prone to enhance in a post-Roe world.

Who’re the “pregnancy police” included in your e book title?

They don’t exist as an precise division or company. I hope they by no means will. Proper now, the being pregnant police are made up of individuals in a bunch of various networks and companies. I might argue that the being pregnant police even exist in our personal minds. Typically we police each other, simply as pals or household or random individuals who determine to weigh in. However the being pregnant police are primarily well being care suppliers: 75% of those circumstances go to regulation enforcement as a result of well being care suppliers make a report. They’re additionally social staff, little one protecting service brokers, regulation enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and typically it’s our neighbors telling on us, typically it’s our boyfriend telling on us.

It actually could possibly be nearly anybody. To me, that speaks to only how pervasive it’s to socially police the behaviors of parents who’re pregnant. Strangers who come up and say, “That’s decaf, isn’t it?” whenever you’re ingesting a espresso. Or individuals who put their hand in your stomach with out asking first. Society feels a way of possession and entitlement over pregnant our bodies.

We’ve been seeing increasingly right-wing rhetoric round fetal personhood — defining a fertilized egg, embryo or fetus as an individual. Some states have written personhood into abortion bans post-Dobbs, whereas others are threatening fertility therapies like in vitro fertilization due to fetal personhood ideology.

How does fetal personhood play into being pregnant criminalization?

At present, fetal personhood appears to be the first motivating issue or not less than the justification for criminalizing being pregnant. This concept that we have to shield these unborn kids from their moms who don’t love them, who received’t maintain them, who received’t do proper by them — fetal personhood is a giant a part of that.

Now that Roe v. Wade is gone and there’s no federal safety that maintains a pregnant individual’s rights earlier than viability [around 24 weeks of pregnancy], it’s a lot simpler to place fetal personhood within the regulation whenever you don’t have to fret about viability being the figuring out issue.

You checked out 1,116 arrests of pregnant individuals for crimes towards embryos and fetuses in South Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee between 1973 and 2022. Are there any tales that basically stick to you to at the present time?

There’s the Marshae Jones case, the place she was shot within the stomach when she was pregnant. Marshae was going to be charged with manslaughter however the shooter wasn’t. Nationwide outrage finally killed that case. However I’m haunted by that case. I can’t assist however take into consideration what the precedent they have been making an attempt to set in that case might imply for victims of intimate associate violence.

Abusers use being pregnant to manage you, maintain you in a relationship. They use kids to create a authorized bond, even after the connection ends. So the concept your abuser can beat you up and also you get in bother for it since you didn’t shield your being pregnant, and now you will have even fewer choices, since you’re charged with a criminal offense? Terrifying.

A big a part of your e book focuses on the criminalization of pregnant individuals for drug use throughout their pregnancies.

Sure, many of the circumstances in my e book do contain medicine. I do know this might be onerous for some individuals, the concept of a pregnant individual utilizing medicine. We’ve additionally been taught some very deceptive, if not fully false issues, about what sure substances will do to a being pregnant.

However I really feel compelled to carve out the excellence I’m making: I’m not saying that pregnant girls have particular rights to do medicine. I’m saying that individuals who aren’t pregnant don’t get charged with crimes for testing optimistic for medicine and pregnant individuals do – and that may be a distinction.

If we’re arresting you for possession or gross sales or manufacturing, that’s one thing we do on a regular basis. We’re not charging pregnant individuals with these issues, or not less than not these issues solely. We’re charging them with issues like little one abuse, murder, supply of medicine to a minor, in some circumstances manslaughter. Many of those are felonies. There are individuals spending a long time in jail due to these sorts of circumstances.

Are you able to discuss to me about how substance use has been weaponized towards pregnant individuals?

We’ve been bizarre about substances for a very long time. That’s one thing I discovered whereas studying the historical past and literature for this e book. Our considerations about substances are nearly all the time tied to different, broader social considerations. It’s by no means simply: That is dangerous for you. It’s nearly all the time: That is dangerous for you as a result of these individuals are those doing it.

A wing of the prohibition of alcohol motion was doing it as a result of slaves had been emancipated and other people believed they have been going to get drunk and rape white girls. That has been true in our trendy drug disaster as effectively. Lots of people are aware of how the conflict on medicine and the give attention to crack, specifically, was a giant a part of mass incarceration in the USA.

A narrative that has been much less explored — although there are great feminist teachers who’ve checked out it — is how a lot of the crack panic was about pregnant individuals and infants. It actually was understood as these uncaring girls who’re irresponsible and egocentric are birthing hordes of monsters which might be going to smash the USA. The way in which they described it with crack was that these kids can be inherently violent, they wouldn’t be capable of maintain down a job, they’d be delinquent.

It was fascinating to learn concerning the hyperlink between being pregnant criminalization and, as you wrote, the three “periods of radicalized drug panic”: South Carolina’s crack cocaine disaster, Alabama’s methamphetamine disaster and Tennessee’s opioid disaster.

Proper. After the crack disaster, it occurred another time in Alabama. Throughout that point, they have been actually centered on meth. It was understood, not less than within the Southeast, as a poor white trash drug. So, as an alternative of poor Black inner-city individuals, now it’s poor white individuals in trailers. These infants have been additionally described as they’re going to develop up and be psychotic and violent and value some huge cash. And we [society] are going to must pay for it as a result of these egocentric girls received’t simply love their infants sufficient to cease doing medicine.

Then we see it repeated once more in Tennessee with opioids. The way in which that we’ve talked about opioids has been considerably completely different from the way in which we’ve talked about different trendy drug crises. A part of that’s as a result of so most of the individuals which might be hooked on opioids are people who received injured on the job and now they’re hooked to those drugs that they initially received by way of a medical prescription. So we’ve got sympathy as a result of they’re white and employed and it began as a medical factor as an alternative of a enjoyable or social factor. That, by some means, makes it higher or extra ethical.

Sadly, that understanding has not included pregnant people. The speak about people who’re pregnant and use opioids is mostly simply as punitive, and the coverage responses have been actually punitive, too. It being thought of a white working-class or middle-class drug hasn’t been sufficient to insulate the pregnant people who’re utilizing it, too.

You embrace an ideal quote from professor and writer Michele Goodwin — whose work you be aware has been instructive to your e book — about how “the criminalization of poor, pregnant women of color was perceived as a race issue — something too remote for feminist discourse and activism.”

I like that Michele Goodwin quote. I’ve been desirous about it because the latest IVF case out of Alabama. There was a lot nationwide and worldwide outrage — rightful outrage — that embryos are outlined as extra-uterine kids.

That was an outrageous second, and we needs to be offended. And in addition, most of these individuals do not know that fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses have been thought of authorized kids in Alabama since 2013, actually. Then there’s the query of: Why don’t they know that? Why didn’t they care then? The place was the outrage then?

To me, I can’t assist however assume it’s due to who can entry IVF versus who is generally getting arrested and put in jail. There’s not a number of overlap there. Possibly if we [had] cared just a little extra then, we wouldn’t be the place we at the moment are.

How did a long time of ignoring being pregnant criminalization affect at this time’s panorama, now that we’re in a post-Roe world?

There are 38 states which have legal guidelines of their legal codes that outline both fertilized eggs, embryos or fetuses as crime victims, doubtlessly. It varies by state, however that’s a number of states.

Most of those payments have been, usually, created in response to a very terrible homicide case of a pregnant individual. These legal guidelines nearly by no means get into the meat of it, which is that individuals’s intimate companions are those who’re doing the hurt to them, and perhaps we have to strategy it from that facet. However these are all white girls who’re victims, who’re murdered or lose their pregnancies as a result of they’re attacked, and so they need some type of authorized recognition of the being pregnant loss so the one that harm them will get heightened expenses.

So, 38 states have these legal guidelines, and in circumstances the place we’ve had arrests in these states — which is all earlier than Roe v. Wade was overturned — these arrests all the time occur after we acknowledge the fetus as a criminal offense sufferer.

Right here’s the way it goes: We established the fetus as a criminal offense sufferer as a result of a white, respectable girl received attacked. Then a non-respectable girl does one thing dangerous and we use that protecting regulation to punish that dangerous girl. It’s so simple for a state courtroom to show the fetus as a criminal offense sufferer of third-party hurt right into a fetus that’s now a sufferer of an abortion supplier or the one that is gestating it. States are exploring this proper now.

Clarence Thomas pointed this out on the oral arguments for Dobbs. He didn’t title the case, however he referenced it. He requested, hey, if we’re allowed to punish girls for utilizing medicine throughout their being pregnant based mostly on the concept a fetus is an individual, how within the hell is it authorized for individuals to deliberately terminate their pregnancies?

And you understand what? Truthful. If we’re being constant, that doesn’t make sense. For me, we should always both say it out loud, that pregnant individuals aren’t going to have rights — and that’s how we’re doing it — or we want to verify pregnant people have rights.

So, do you assume we’re on a path the place extra individuals might be criminalized for his or her being pregnant outcomes?

I feel so, for a couple of causes. Sure, extra states are exploring criminalization now. Most just lately, Texas Republicans mentioned they’re probably going to pursue the loss of life penalty for individuals who get abortions.

We’re additionally seeing individuals taking larger authorized dangers to entry abortion care. Due to the authorized modifications which have occurred in states with abortion entry, specifically, individuals are being put into positions the place they’re taking authorized dangers that they won’t have needed to earlier than. You might need been in a position to go and get your first-trimester abortion in North Carolina, however now you need to order drugs by way of the mail and hope you don’t get in bother later. That may be very scary to me.