The rights of pregnant people are under attack both in the statehouses and from the federal government. With Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, combined with increasingly strict TRAP statutes across the country, we could be facing a full Roe repeal or at least a severe crippling of abortion protections. But there is also a more insidious trend: the criminalization of pregnancy.
The trend of criminalizing pregnancy takes two forms. Either prosecutors and judges contort existing laws in ways they were never intended, or legislators propose and pass new laws that target pregnant people. Prosecutions of miscarriage, stillbirth, abortion, and drug use during pregnancy — even when the drugs are prescribed and when the drugs do not harm the fetus — have become widespread.
As these cases continue to trickle in across the country, it becomes overwhelmingly clear that a person’s human rights are devalued and violated upon becoming pregnant. In Virginia, Katherine Dellis was sentenced to five months in jail in February 2017. Her crime? Suffering a stillbirth and disposing of the remains before seeking emergency medical help.
