This is an adapted excerpt from the May 24 episode of “Velshi.”
As the journalist and author Jessica Valenti recently wrote, “We don’t need to imagine a dystopian future where women are being used as incubators and arrested for miscarriages, because that future is already here.”
It’s been almost three years since the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ending the constitutional right to an abortion, and post-Roe America is turning out to be much worse than most of us imagined.
According to the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice, there were at least 210 pregnancy-related prosecutions in the year after Roe was overturned.
It’s not just the inhumanity of denying women rights over their own bodies and futures, or the deadly danger of forced birth. What we’re witnessing is the criminalization of women’s bodies. Women aren’t just being arrested and jailed for their miscarriages; they are being pursued in creatively cruel ways that are a direct result of the radical anti-abortion ideology of fetal personhood.
If a fetus is legally a person, then law enforcement is empowered to criminally investigate pregnancies. Let that sink in for a moment: If a fetus is a person in the eyes of the law, any miscarriage — which, by the way is not uncommon, 10% to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriages — if you live in the wrong state, can be treated as a potential homicide.
This isn’t theoretical. Consider the case of Mallori Patrice Strait, a Texas woman who was released from jail last week after spending nearly five months in custody for miscarrying in a public bathroom. Strait was arrested for “corpse abuse” and accused of trying to flush fetal remains down the toilet. Ultimately, the medical examiner found she had, in fact, miscarried — that her fetus died in utero — and prosecutors found “no direct evidence” that she tried to flush anything.
But what she experienced cannot be undone: the compounded trauma of being criminalized after suffering something as emotionally and physically taxing as a miscarriage. Strait was dealt punishment when what she really needed was care.
In Ohio, Brittany Watts was also arrested on corpse abuse charges after she had a miscarriage in a toilet; Watts’ charges were also dropped. In Georgia, Selena Maria Chandler-Scott had a miscarriage and was arrested for disposing of the fetal tissue. Law enforcement accused her of “concealing a death” and “abandoning a dead body.” But just like the other cases, her charges were eventually dropped.
According to the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice, there were at least 210 pregnancy-related prosecutions in the year after Roe was overturned, the highest number to ever be documented in a single year. It’s important to note that low-income women and women of color have been disproportionately targeted.
It’s only expected to get worse as more states pass fetal personhood laws, declaring that fertilized eggs have the same legal rights as people, even though they cannot survive outside the womb. According to Pregnancy Justice, at least 24 states now include some form of personhood language in their anti-abortion laws. Seventeen already have laws on the books, and several others are considering extreme expansions, including Florida, where the University of Florida newspaper points out:
If state lawmakers have their way, a simple sip of wine or a single cigarette — taken before a woman even knows she is pregnant — could become a criminal offense. Anything a woman does that could potentially injure a fetus, whether that be accidental or intentional, could be deemed as child abuse and neglect according to the proposed fetal personhood bill. Meanwhile, as the push to police and criminalize pregnant women intensifies, the Trump administration has been working to decriminalize activists who target abortion providers and their patients. One of Trump’s first presidential actions was to pardon nearly two dozen people who’d been convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (known as FACE), a federal law that protects patients from violence, threats and obstruction when seeking reproductive care. Then, the Justice Department announced that, moving forward, it would limit enforcement of the FACE Act. The FACE Act was passed 30 years ago with bipartisan support amid a wave of extremist violence against abortion providers. According to the National Abortion Federation, the violence has continued in post-Roe America. Over the past two years, there have been more than 700 incidents of obstruction, over 600 trespassing attempts, nearly 300 violent threats and over 128,000 protests aimed at abortion providers across the country. Despite this reality, Republicans in Congress are now pushing legislation to repeal the FACE Act altogether.
Ali Velshi is the host of “Velshi,” which airs Saturdays and Sundays on MSNBC. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award for Business & Consumer Reporting for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special on the near collapse of the American auto industry. His work on disabled workers and Chicago’s red-light camera scandal in 2016 earned him two News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations, adding to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism coverage.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
Ayanna Runcie
Ayanna Runcie is a Segment Producer for "Velshi."
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