Argentina – We Are All Belén

by Michelle Young
December 15, 2025

Belén (2025) is Argentina’s International Feature Film entry for the upcoming Oscars. The story is a true one, and it follows Belén, a pseudonym for a real woman who is falsely imprisoned for having an abortion, when she really had a miscarriage. Belén is held for over two years in Tucumán, Argentina, before being released in 2016. By telling her story, the film shows us a society that’s happy to predetermine a woman’s guilt when it comes to questions around abortion.

Unaware she’s pregnant, Belén goes to the hospital presenting with severe abdominal pain. The doctor determines she’s having a miscarriage at 22 weeks, which is considered the second trimester. It’s important to know that it’s entirely possible to be pregnant for this long and not know it – there’s even a term for it – a cryptic pregnancy.

Continued: https://latinamedia.co/belen/

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

Hundreds of US women charged with pregnancy-related crimes since fall of Roe

Study finds prosecutors targeting low-income women mainly in US south – and figure likely to be an undercount

Carter Sherman
Tue 30 Sep 2025

In the first two years after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, prosecutors in 16 states charged more than 400 people with pregnancy-related crimes, new research released on Tuesday found.

Of the 412 cases tracked by Pregnancy Justice, the vast majority took place in the US south, targeted low-income women and involved allegations that women broke laws against child abuse, endangerment or neglect, according to the research, which was compiled by the reproductive justice group. About 300 prosecutions took place in Alabama and Oklahoma. In 16 cases, law enforcement charged women with homicide.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/30/pregnancy-us-women-crimes-study

30.09.2025

prosecuting women for abortion

prosecuting women for miscarriage

prosecuting women for pregnancy

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/

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

USA – Anti-Abortion Activists See Their Moon-Shot Goal Within Reach

And we’re already experiencing the consequences.

By Mary Ziegler
Feb 14, 2025

In 2022 the Louisiana Legislature became the first to advance a bill to criminalize abortion seekers. While conservative states often punish women for pregnancy-related conduct, as the group Pregnancy Justice documents, jurisdictions that ban abortion have been careful to stress that they don’t punish women for abortion itself. And when Louisiana came close to doing that, the most powerful national anti-abortion organizations moved to kill the bill, arguing that the movement was united in viewing women as victims, not perpetrators, of abortion.

That might have been it: The movement’s powers that be had spoken, and the case was closed. But this legislative session has already seen a wave of bills authorizing the punishment of abortion patients, proposed by so-called abortion abolitionists, who argue that their bills are the only way for the anti-abortion movement to be logically consistent, as well as morally (and biblically) justified.

Continued; https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/anti-abortion-legislation-fetal-personhood.html

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

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