USA – An emboldened anti-abortion faction wants women who have abortions to face criminal charges

By CHRISTINE FERNANDO
April 12, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — As Kristan Hawkins, president of the national anti-abortion group Students for Life, tours college campuses, she has grown accustomed to counterprotests from abortion rights activists.

But more recently, fellow abortion opponents, who call themselves abortion abolitionists, are showing up to her booths with signs, often screaming “baby killer” at her while she speaks with students. Hawkins has had to send alerts to donors asking them to help pay for increased security.

Continued: https://apnews.com/article/abortion-abolitionists-trump-roe-criminal-homicide-d6d5c7a05419fe9ded04271cb517b001

Woman’s arrest after miscarriage in Georgia draws fear and anger

Experts say the arrest is part of a pattern of criminalizing pregnancy that has accelerated since the fall of Roe v. Wade.

April 5, 2025
By Bracey Harris

On March 20 in rural Georgia, an ambulance responded to an early morning 911 call about an unconscious, bleeding woman at an apartment. When first responders arrived, they determined that she’d had a miscarriage. That was only the start of her ordeal.

Selena Maria Chandler-Scott was transported to a hospital, but a witness reported that she had placed the fetal remains in a dumpster. When police investigated, they recovered the remains and Chandler-Scott was charged with concealing the death of another person and abandoning a dead body. The charges were ultimately dropped; an autopsy determined Chandler-Scott had had a “natural miscarriage“ at around 19 weeks and the fetus was nonviable.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/georgia-arrest-miscarriage-fetal-personhood-rcna199400

Post-Roe, pregnant women face growing risk of criminal prosecution for charges much broader than abortion

By Deidre McPhillips, CNN
Tue September 24, 2024

A fractured landscape of reproductive rights continues to evolve in the United States in the wake of the Supreme Court Dobbs decision that revoked the federal right to an abortion, and a new report suggests that pregnant women now face increased risk of criminal prosecution.

Between June 2022 and June 2023, there were more than 200 cases in which a pregnant person faced criminal charges for conduct associated with pregnancy, pregnancy loss or birth — the most cases recorded in a single year over decades of tracking, according to Pregnancy Justice, a nonprofit focused on the civil and human rights of pregnant people.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/24/health/criminal-charges-during-pregnancy-increase/index.html

24.09.2024

Commentary

Research

Amari Marsh

arresting pregnant women

USA – Could you go to prison for having a miscarriage?

Dec 8, 2023
Aisha Sultan, Columnist and features writer

Imagine dealing with the trauma of losing a pregnancy and facing a police investigation and criminal charges in the midst of your grief and devastation.

It seems like a dystopian nightmare. Why would a woman, already physically and emotionally wrecked, be put through this kind of cruelty by the state? It’s been happening more often than most people realize.

Continued: https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/column/aisha-sultan/sultan-could-you-go-to-prison-for-having-a-miscarriage/article_a5af41d0-9504-11ee-b4e8-33a37eee5d89.html

El Salvador – These women say their babies were stillborn. Courts convicted them of homicide in a country with harsh abortion laws

By Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN
Sun October 8, 2023

A sign greets visitors arriving at a sun-filled two-story house in El Salvador’s capital.

“You must enter smiling,” it says. “Before you come in, you will find an invisible bag where you can leave your sorrows. When you leave, you can decide whether to take them with you.”

Teodora Vásquez knows the women seeking shelter, support or a fresh start here often have decades of sorrows weighing on them. And she’s propped up this sign beside a green plastic turtle near the front door as a first step toward the healing she hopes they’ll start to find within these walls.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/08/health/el-salvador-abortion-homicide-convictions-cec/index.html

The nightmarish reality of the GOP’s hope for a total abortion ban

Would Republicans really pursue a national abortion ban? Many advocates for abortion rights believe so.

July 4, 2022
By Zeeshan Aleem, MSNBC Opinion Columnist

The Supreme Court’s elimination of the constitutional right to an abortion in America marked the shocking fulfillment of a decadeslong lobbying effort by the American anti-abortion movement and the GOP agenda to radicalize the court to the point where it would overturn what appeared to be settled legal rights. But just hours after the decision came out, top Republicans already had their eye on something else.

Until very recently, the possibility that millions of women around the country would lose their abortion rights seemed remote. Now we’re looking at the nontrivial possibility that Republicans attempt legislation stripping them from the whole country.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/national-abortion-ban-could-be-next-republicans-list-n1296696

USA – The Coming Rise of Abortion as a Crime

In places where abortion is now illegal, a range of pregnancy losses could be subject to state scrutiny.
By Melissa Jeltsen
JULY 1, 2022

Before last week, women attempting to have their pregnancies terminated in states hostile to abortion rights already faced a litany of obstacles: lengthy drives, waiting periods, mandated counseling, throngs of volatile protesters. Now they face a new reality. Although much is still unknown about how abortion bans will be enforced, we have arrived at a time when abortions—and even other pregnancy losses—might be investigated as potential crimes. In many states across post-Roe America, expect to see women treated like criminals.

On Friday, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending abortion as a constitutional right. Nearly half of U.S. states either are in the process of implementing trigger bans—which were set up to outlaw abortions quickly after Roe was overturned—or seem likely to soon severely curtail abortion access. Reproductive-rights experts told me that in the near future, they expect to see more criminal investigations and arrests of women who induce their own abortions, as well as those who lose pregnancies through miscarriage and stillbirth.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/07/roe-illegal-abortions-pregnancy-termination-state-crime/661420/

How abortion bans could be enforced if Roe v. Wade is reversed

By Tierney Sneed, CNN
Wed June 22, 2022

(CNN)If the Supreme Court issues a ruling that would allow states to ban abortion, as is expected in the coming days, such a decision would raise new questions about how authorities would enforce such bans and whether the anti-abortion movement would stick to its public emphasis on protecting abortion-seekers themselves from prosecution.

What has been the pattern abroad in countries that ban abortion, along with United States' own experience before Roe, previews a complicated and unequal enforcement landscape.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/22/politics/roe-abortion-prosecution-tactics/index.html

USA – How to Protect Yourself When Seeking an Abortion. Learn your legal risks.

By
Bindu Bansinath and Katie Heaney
May 23, 2022

The illusion that anti-abortion lawmakers wouldn’t try to criminalize abortion
seekers was shattered this year with the introduction of a Louisiana bill that
would have allowed prosecutors to bring murder charges against them (the bill
was revamped and that section was dropped). Though most abortion restrictions
don’t explicitly penalize pregnant people, Dana Sussman, acting executive
director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, says the organization
has documented “over 1,700 cases from 1973 to 2020 that criminalize pregnant
people” for a number of reasons, from self-managed abortion to stillbirth to
suspected drug use. Prosecutors have also used feticide and child abuse or
neglect statutes to charge women who ended their pregnancies. In 2015, Purvi
Patel was tried on both those counts in Indiana and sentenced to 20 years in
prison after allegedly self-managing her abortion (her conviction was
eventually overturned).

https://www.thecut.com/article/abortion-legal-risks-digital-privacy.html

USA – Not Just Abortion: How Criminalization of Pregnancy Also Impacts Miscarriage Care

Abortion and the management of pregnancy loss, combined with the risk posed by criminalization of adverse pregnancy outcomes, only hurts pregnant people

Dec 3, 2021
Caroline Reilly, Rewire News.

“She gave me the pills—I think about this all the time—in an unmarked manila envelope and told me what to do with them when I got home,” said Kate, who received misoprostol for a missed miscarriage in the first trimester of her pregnancy in 2017. At her ten-week checkup, she had a negative pregnancy test. At an ultrasound appointment a few days later, her doctor explained it was a blighted ovum, a miscarriage of an embryo that had stopped developing.

Continued: https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2021/12/03/not-just-abortion-how-criminalization-of-pregnancy-also-impacts-miscarriage-care/