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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.

That criminal defense perspective frames how Thompson has been thinking about another major development of the post-Roe era: efforts to enshrine abortion rights into state constitutions. Since 2022, voters in 12 states have passed ballot measures aimed at protecting abortion rights, including seven states in November. But half of those measures restrict or ban abortions after viability—the point when a fetus is capable of living outside the womb, usually at around 22 to 24 weeks’ gestation. In Missouri, Ohio, and other states, reproductive rights advocates have rationalized viability limits as a necessary evil to win over voters who might be squeamish about abortions later in pregnancy. The same debate has been playing out in Virginia, where advocates are trying to get a constitutional amendment on the 2026 ballot.

“I get it,” Thompson says. “But my eyes and this organization’s eyes are on who is being criminalized.” By creating a constitutional line between acceptable and unacceptable abortions, she says law enforcement is given a powerful weapon it can use against women for any actions that might be seen as harming a viable fetus—drug use in pregnancy, for instance—as well as a rationale to investigate and punish people for miscarriages and stillbirths. “It’s already happening,” she says, “and viability lines just make it easier.”

A new report by Pregnancy Justice and the advocacy group Patient Forward underscores the fact that one of the most insidious things about viability lines is their close relationship to fetal personhood, the once-fringe idea—now increasingly embraced by the Republican mainstream—that embryos and fetuses are entitled to the same constitutional rights as anyone else. Personhood arguments are foundational to the anti-abortion movement, part of its long-term strategy to outlaw all abortions. Reproductive rights groups should be doing everything they can to fight the spread of personhood laws, the report’s authors argue. Instead, Thompson says, by accepting viability limits, abortion advocates are unwittingly legitimizing the idea of fetal rights. 

I recently met Thompson at a convening of legal scholars and maternal health advocates at the UCLA School of Law and followed up by Zoom. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Gestational limits have been a central issue in the abortion debate since 1973, when Roe v. Wade held that women had a constitutional right to abortion until viability. When did you first become aware of the dangers that gestational limits pose to abortion rights? 

After I graduated from law school in 2003, I got a job at a big private law firm, Morrison & Foerster, that does a lot of pro bono work on reproductive issues. My first pro bono case was against a guy named William Graham, who was holding himself out as an abortion provider in New Orleans. He had a business name, Causeway Center for Women, that was very similar to a real abortion provider, Causeway Medical Clinic. People would go through the Yellow........

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