Reproductive rights are not just a health concern – they’re also a legal one.
A new research effort finds that just shy of 450 charges were brought against women on matters pertaining to pregnancy loss, birth choices or abortions in the first two years following the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that had made abortions accessible nationwide.
The vast majority of the charges “asserted some form of child abuse, neglect, or endangerment,” researchers noted in the report, coordinated by nonprofit Pregnancy Justice, which advocates on behalf of pregnant people. More than 75% of the individuals charged were low-income.
And nine of the cases included in the study directly centered upon attempts to obtain an abortion. “These cases show that … pregnant people’s contemplation of abortion can be weaponized against them,” the report reads.
The organization added that these figures likely underrepresent the full scope of the issue.
These cases, in part, are being used to further a movement to establish fetal personhood as a legal standard, those involved with the study say. “That is the ultimate goal of the anti-abortion movement,” Dana Sussman, senior vice president at Pregnancy Justice, told The Guardian. “It wasn’t just to overturn Roe. It is to establish full personhood, full rights for embryos and fetuses.”
These cases, Sussman added, combine to create “a perfect storm of all of the things that we work on: Stigmatizing pregnant people for not being perfect pregnant people, blaming them for their perceived failures, and relying on misinformation and junk science to create a panic when there shouldn’t be one or isn’t one.”
And the sheer number of cases points to “increasing surveillance in the police state to monitor and potentially criminalize people when they don’t when they don’t meet these impossible ideals.”
