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:








