The Criminalization of Abortion: What to Expect In a Post-Roe United States
The leaked draft of a Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade wasn’t surprising, but as a person with a uterus, it was shattering to read Justice Samuel Alito’s words codifying a change in law that would allow states to criminalize my health care. Yet even in shock, I know the odds are that as a white person with a good job in a blue state, I would likely be okay. But my time as a public defender tells me, in no uncertain terms, that low-income Americans and people of color wouldn't be.
It’s easy to let this news paralyze you with fear and disgust, but my coping mechanism has always been to think about the next tactics we need to engage in the fight. As we urgently turn to health care providers, looking to offer resources and protection to doctors and their patients, we have to also think about how punitive state laws would play out through the horrors of our criminal legal system. This is where public defenders come in.
The end of Roe would lead to more laws that recognize the rights of the fetus over those of the pregnant person. As a result, people across the country could be prosecuted for activities they engage in while pregnant, including smoking weed and refusing to follow a doctor’s advice. This sort of criminalization is already happening in states where the woman’s right to choose has long been legislated into nonexistence. Over the years, women have been deprived of liberty because they were accused of harming or endangering a fetus, and the pace of these prosecutions is rising: 413 such cases took place between the passage of Roe in 1973 and 2005, whereas 1,254 of these cases have been identified between 2006 and 2020.
These cases have not been — and will not be — limited to people who have sought abortion care. Rather, they represent the ham-fisted bigotry of the state enacting violence on pregnant people's bodies regardless of behavior, conduct, or culpability. We can expect to see things like a nurse who calls the cops on a woman who miscarries in the emergency room at 16 weeks; an abusive husband who uses an antiabortion statute to accuse his partner of deliberately ending a lost pregnancy; a coworker turning someone in for taking a “mysterious” out-of-state trip.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/criminalization-of-abortion-laws-roe
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