At least 210 women faced criminal charges related to pregnancy, abortion, pregnancy loss, or birth 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 of the cases — 121 of the 210 — the information later used against the women was obtained or disclosed in a medical setting, researchers found.
The period examined — from June 2022, when the court’s decision was released, to June 2023 — represented the highest number of pregnancy-related criminalizations in U.S. history, the authors of the report said. This initial report is part of a three-year study of pregnancy criminalization in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision; the organization is working in partnership with researchers from the University of Tennessee, the University of South Carolina, the University of Texas Austin, and the University of Alabama.
Most of the cases involved allegations of substance use during pregnancy, including 86 instances that concerned the use of marijuana. Five involved allegations of researching, mentioning, or attempting to get an abortion.
Nearly half of the prosecutions — 104 of them — took place in the state of Alabama, where abortion is almost completely banned and fetal personhood is enshrined as a matter of law. Rolling Stone documented the fallout from Alabama’s embrace of fetal personhood as it relates to pregnancy criminalization, IVF access, miscarriage management in June.
Oklahoma, with 68 prosecutions, and South Carolina, with 10, represented the second and third highest number of cases. Both states also have personhood laws on the books, as well as near-total abortion bans. They were followed by Ohio (7 cases), Mississippi (6), and Texas (6).
Between 1973, when Roe v. Wade became law across the United States, and 2022, when it was overruled by a conservative majority, researchers documented 1,800 cases of pregnancy-related criminalization.
Researchers cautioned that even as the 210 figure is the highest they’ve seen in any year dating back to 1973, it also represents an undercount of cases, as they have continued “to uncover additional cases initiated during” the year after Roe was overturned that did not make it into this initial analysis. They plan to release a more comprehensive report covering the three-year period following the court’s decision.
The report showed that the Supreme Court’s ruling “emboldened prosecutors to develop ever more aggressive strategies to prosecute pregnancy,” Lourdes Rivera, president of Pregnancy Justice, said in a statement. The sharp rise of prosecutions, Rivera added, “is directly tied to the radical legal doctrine of ‘fetal personhood,’ which grants full legal rights to an embryo or fetus, turning them into victims of crimes perpetrated by pregnant women.”
Pregnancy criminalization is not limited to conservative states — researchers documented at least one post-Roe prosecution in California — and it could become a national issue if the GOP wins in November.
As Rolling Stone reported earlier this year, the recognition of fetal personhood has been an explicit policy goal of the national Republican Party dating back to the 1980s. The GOP platform has called for amending the U.S. Constitution to recognize the rights of embryos, and representatives in Congress have introduced legislation that would recognize life begins at conception hundreds of times — as recently as this current session, when the Life at Conception Act attracted the co-sponsorship of 127 sitting Republican members of Congress.
The Republican Party reiterated that position with its most recent party platform, ratified in July of this year.
