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

USA – What Would It Mean to Defend All Abortions?

Democrats love to avoid it, and Republicans love to lie about it. But later-abortion care has never been more important.

Amy Littlefield
May 13, 2025

Ayana, 28 years old and 28 weeks pregnant, eases herself onto the procedure table at Partners in Abortion Care in College Park, Maryland. She is a Black woman with the tiny bearing and erect posture of a bird. Above her head, a flock of pink and blue butterflies decorates the ceiling. In a few minutes, a doctor will perform an injection to the fetal heart to end her pregnancy.

Ayana had spent months in turmoil over this abortion. As she chased after her two older kids while lugging her 1-year-old on family outings to the arcade and the movies, she tried to imagine hauling two car seats instead of one. While she changed her baby’s diapers, she thought about what a newborn would subtract from him. The family was already stretched thin.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/defending-all-abortions/

The New War on Drugs

Criminalization of abortion medication turns women’s bodies into crime scenes

Karen Thompson (Director of Litigation at Pregnancy Justice)
Aug 21, 2024

Earlier this year Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed into law SB 276, a first-of-its-kind legislation classifying mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled dangerous substances. The drugs, commonly used to perform medication abortions, are responsible for 63% of abortions in the US. As a result of this new law, mere possession of mifepristone and misoprostol without a prescription in Louisiana can result in fines of up to $5,000 or “imprisonment of no more than five years with or without hard labor.”

We know what happens now: The outcome of this new layer of criminalization is entirely foreseeable. By putting the pills on a drug registry with special access rules, providers are no longer able to easily prescribe the pills and the ability of OB/GYNs to nimbly provide needed—and even emergency—health care if a woman is miscarrying is chilled. In Louisiana’s telling, mife and miso are the new heroin and medication abortion care puts pregnant people’s lives in jeopardy, not their own dangerous law. The lack of situational awareness around the law would be comical if the inevitable devastation of its effects wasn’t so horrifying.

Continued: https://jessica.substack.com/p/mifepristone-misoprostol-war-on-drugs

21.08.2024