The Right Comes for Puerto Rico’s Abortion Clinics

A conservative senator wants them criminally investigated

Susanne Ramírez de Arellano
Apr 29, 2026

SAN JUAN — A few months ago, I wrote that Puerto Rico had become the new battleground for women’s reproductive rights. Over the past year, there have been several attacks to restrict a woman’s right to choose. Just a few months ago, pro-statehood Partido Nuevo Progresista Governor Jenniffer González-Colón signed a law that gives fetuses legal personhood and classifies the death of an unborn child at any stage of pregnancy as murder.

I described these changes as dystopian and warned that, although abortion remains legal in Puerto Rico, women’s lives are at risk as even stricter restrictions loom.

Continued: https://thelatinonewsletter.org/p/right-comes-for-puerto-rico-abortion-clinics

A fetus is not a person, Taiwan court rules in child neglect case

April 3, 2026

Taipei, April 1 (CNA) A married couple who frequently smoked meth at home during the wife's pregnancy cannot be sentenced for impeding their child's development, since Taiwan's Criminal Code does not treat an unborn fetus as a person, a Kaohsiung court has ruled.

According to the verdict by the Kaohsiung District Court, the father surnamed Chen (陳) and mother surnamed Lin (林) frequently smoked meth in their Siaogang District home in the presence of both their 1-year-old son and the baby that Lin was pregnant with.

Continued https://www.ocac.gov.tw/OCAC/Eng/Pages/Detail.aspx?nodeid=329&pid=85063454

03.04.2026

News

drug use and pregnancy

fetal personhood

fetus not a person

Kaohsiung District Court

USA – Separating Abortion and Pregnancy-Loss Care Harms Everyone

New bills seek to reinforce a false binary between abortion care and care for pregnancy loss, but this will only harm pregnant patients and further restrict access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive healthcare.

Isabel Guarnieri, Kimya Forouzan - Common Dreams
Mar 29, 2026

People experiencing pregnancy complications in states that restrict abortion have died preventable deaths; others have been forced to bleed out while waiting for providers to deem their conditions were life-threatening enough to receive care under narrow legal exceptions or had to travel out of state for emergency abortion care. Meanwhile survivors of rape and incest have been denied care, despite exceptions that supposedly permitted abortion in those circumstances.

This is the new reality of seeking pregnancy-loss care and abortion care post-Dobbs. But instead of addressing the root issue—abortion bans and restrictions—policymakers are advancing a new strategy: redefining abortion itself. These new bills seek to reinforce a false binary between abortion care and care for pregnancy loss, but this will only harm pregnant patients and further restrict access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive healthcare.

Continued: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/abortion-and-pregnancy-loss

29.03.2026

USA – How Hospitals Helped Erode Reproductive Rights

Criminal prosecutions sparked by hospital drug testing helped advance the legal concept that the fetus had interests the state could protect.

By Shoshana Walter, The Marshall Project
March 14, 2026a

In 1988, a nurse at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston decided she was fed up. She and her colleagues had grown alarmed about the number of women coming in to give birth who appeared to be addicted to crack cocaine. The hospital began drug testing pregnant patients — predominantly low-income Black women — and gathered with local law enforcement officials to come up with a plan: If the women tested positive, the hospital would hand them over to police. Soon, women, some still bleeding from childbirth, were being carried out of the hospital in shackles and chains.

The hospital was far from alone. Across the country, fervor over “crack babies,” and particularly Black women who birthed them, was reaching a fever pitch.

Continued: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2026/03/14/hospital-police-pregnant-south-carolina

USA – The Next Phase of the Abortion Wars: Targeting Pills, Helpers and Patients

The Next Phase of the Abortion Wars: Targeting Pills, Helpers and Patients
Four years after Dobbs, state lawmakers are shifting from outright bans to a sweeping strategy of lawsuits, criminal penalties and cross-state battles aimed at cutting off the last remaining routes to abortion care.

Feb 12, 2026
by Ava Slocum, Ms. Magazine

The first year of Trump’s second term marked major blows for reproductive healthcare. Medicaid funding cuts forced about 50 Planned Parenthood clinics to close throughout the U.S. and blocked 1.1 million Planned Parenthood patients on Medicaid from using their insurance to pay for reproductive healthcare. Twenty-three independent abortion clinics throughout the country also shut down in 2025, according to Abortion Care Network’s annual report.

2025 also saw some new, troubling trends in state-level reproductive healthcare policies, including restrictions on medication abortion and shield laws and criminalization for people who help patients access abortions.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2026/02/12/abortion-bans-pills-state-shield-laws-fetal-personhood/

Pregnancy is increasingly criminalized in the United States

‘In a post-Dobbs world, every pregnancy loss is potentially suspect,’ said Dana Sussman, senior vice president of Pregnancy Justice.

January 21, 2026
By Rebekah Sager

Imagine the trauma of not only losing a pregnancy to a miscarriage, but then being arrested, jailed, and charged following the loss. According to legal scholars, the number of pregnant people being charged with crimes in connection with miscarriages, along with those charged in connection with abortions, is increasing.

In the fall of 2024, Pregnancy Justice, a national advocacy organization that defends the civil and legal rights of pregnant people, released a study documenting 210 pregnancy-related criminal cases brought in the two years that followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June 2022 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that reversed Roe v. Wade. A year later, the organization updated the figure to 412 pregnancy-related criminal cases. Many of those cases concerned substance abuse during pregnancies that resulted in live births.

Continued: https://pennsylvaniaindependent.com/reproductive_rights/pregnancy-miscarriage-abortion-criminal-charges-fetal-personhood-laws-loss/

21.01.2026

Commentary

Criminalizing Pregnancy

criminalizing women

criminalizing women for miscarriage

US prosecutors keep charging women with ‘pregnancy-related crimes’

In the two years after Roe v Wade was overturned, hundreds were charged amid growing acceptance of ‘fetal personhood’

Arwa Mahdawi
Sat 4 Oct 2025

The pregnancy police are racking up arrests

Every 74 seconds, someone in the US is sexually assaulted. And every nine minutes that ‘someone’ is a child, according to statistics collated by the anti-sexual violence non-profit Rainn.

Instead of sending alleged sex offenders to court, the Trump administration seems more interested in putting them in positions of power. Less than 4% of reported rapes, sexual assaults and child sexual abuse allegations in certain cities across the country ever lead to a sex crime conviction, an NBC News investigation from earlier this year found. To reiterate: that’s reported assaults. By some counts, nearly 80% of rapes and sexual assaults go unreported.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/04/week-in-patriarchy-pregnancy-crimes

04.10.2025

Commentary

Amnesty International

prosecuting women for miscarriage

prosecuting women for pregnancy

Abortion’s Long History

Abortion has been an inescapable fact of life for millennia. The question is, why do women gain or lose control over their reproductive lives at different times in history?

Linda Greenhouse
September 25, 2025 issue, NY Books (published online Sep 5)

“Abortion has long been an option for women, as far back in the historical record as we can see,” Mary Fissell, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, informs us at the start of Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion, her eye-opening account of undesired pregnancy and its intentional termination across the millennia.

Imagine if Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), in which the Supreme Court repudiated the right to abortion, began with those words instead of his presumptuous first sentence: “Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views.” I say presumptuous because while Alito and the four justices who joined his opinion—all raised in the Catholic Church—no doubt do believe that abortion presents a “profound moral issue,” that is not a view shared by all Americans, many of whom believe that forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term is where the moral problem lies.

Continued: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/09/25/abortions-long-history-linda-greenhouse/

USA – Confusing abortion bans hurt patients. But there’s a cost to making them clearer.

What the debate over “clarification” laws reveals about America three years out from Roe.

by Rachel Cohen Booth
Jul 1, 2025

By the time Republican Rep. Kat Cammack arrived at a Florida emergency room, she was facing an urgent medical crisis: Her pregnancy, then five weeks along, had become ectopic and now threatened her life. It was May 2024, and though Florida’s new and particularly restrictive six-week abortion ban did allow abortion in cases like hers, Cammack said she spent hours convincing hospital staff to administer the standard treatment for ending nonviable pregnancies. Doctors expressed fears about losing their licenses, prompting Cammack to pull up the legislation on her phone to show them that her case fell within legal parameters.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/abortion/418140/abortion-bans-clarification-texas-tennessee-kentucky-reproductive-rights-roe

USA – How Viability Limits End Up Criminalizing Pregnancy

Pregnancy Justice’s legal director, Karen Thompson, warns: “We are in dangerous territory. This is our reality now.”

Nina Martin, Mother Jones
June 30, 2025

When Karen Thompson became the legal director at Pregnancy Justice a year and a half ago, she was still learning about the reproductive justice issues at the heart of the organization’s mission. But after 20 years focused on the criminal justice system, first at the Innocence Project and then at the ACLU of New Jersey, she did know a lot about racial profiling, government surveillance, law enforcement overreach, and wrongful convictions. And to her, the parallels between her earlier work and the increasing criminalization of pregnancy and abortion in post-Roe v. Wade America could not have been clearer. “We are seeing all the same kinds of issues in the repro space that people in the criminal defense space have been talking about for years,” Thompson says.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/06/pregnancy-justice-karen-thompson-viability-limits-fetal-personhood-criminalizing-pregnancy/

30.06.2025