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The Terrifying Future of States’ Criminalizing Pregnant People Is Already Here

The idea of charging people who have abortions with murder is gaining traction on the right. But a report finds that people are already being prosecuted for their pregnancy outcomes.

Anti-abortion rights demonstrators march to the Supreme Court for the 52nd annual March For Life in Washington, DC, on January 24, 2025.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the idea of charging people who have abortions with murder has gained terrifying new traction. During her brief stint as White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia became just the latest prominent conservative to draw attention for her ties to a radical wing of the anti-abortion movement that wants to charge people who have abortions with murder. This year alone, state lawmakers floated 14 bills to charge people who have abortions with homicide. (The idea is still so unpopular across the political spectrum that none of those bills passed.) Yet this whole debate is, in a sense, a red herring, because hundreds of people a year are already being prosecuted for their pregnancy outcomes. The vast majority of those cases involved a live birth where the mother was suspected of using drugs, but in a rising minority of cases since Dobbs, people are also being criminalized for pregnancy loss.

I spoke with Dana Sussman, senior vice president at Pregnancy Justice, about a report the organization published today finding that in the first three years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, prosecutors have initiated at least 902 cases across the country charging individuals with crimes related to pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or birth.

I’ve edited our conversation for brevity and clarity.

Amy Littlefield: What’s new in this report, which looks at pregnancy criminalization in the first three years after Dobbs?

Dana Sussman: When Roe was overturned, we suspected that pregnancy loss would become an increasingly criminally suspect event, and we unfortunately are starting to see that play out in the data. This report finds a significant acceleration in pregnancy loss prosecutions. We now have documented 70 pregnancy loss prosecutions in the first three years post-Dobbs.

AL: I was struck by the breakdown of allegations prosecutors made in the cases you found. There were 871 allegations of substance use during pregnancy, 77 allegations of a lack of prenatal care, and just 13 related to obtaining, attempting or researching an abortion. What does this tell us about who is being criminalized for pregnancy post-Dobbs?

DS: This is the continuation of a trend that we’ve been seeing for decades. The way that pregnancy is policed and prosecuted in the United States is through the lens of substance use. The foundation for prosecuting pregnancy is based in the war on drugs from the 1980s, and the way in which Black women, in particular, were targeted for charges of child abuse when they were deemed substance users, primarily with crack cocaine and this obsession over a “crack baby epidemic” that has been thoroughly debunked. Three state........

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