The Sissy Farenthold Reproductive Justice Defense Project is proud to be a research partner of Pregnancy Justice on the recently released “Pregnancy as a Crime: A Preliminary Report on the First Year After Dobbs.”
The report shows that in the year after Dobbs, prosecutors in the United States initiated at least 210 cases charging people with crimes related to pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or birth – the highest number of criminal cases documented in a single year. It points to devastating consequences from this criminalization, including poor health outcomes, family separation, and loss of privacy, freedom, and bodily autonomy.
The majority of cases, including in Texas, involve charges related to substance use during pregnancy, without any requirement of proof of harm to the fetus or baby. The highest criminalization numbers are in states that have enshrined fetal personhood (granting legal rights to a fetus) in their laws, such as Alabama (104) and Oklahoma (68). In these states, prosecutors use laws such as child neglect or endangerment to prosecute pregnant people.
Texas has also explicitly adopted the concept of fetal personhood. Yet, Texas law wisely contains an exclusion from prosecution for pregnant Texans for abortion, homicide, and assaultive offenses, including child neglect and endangerment, in relation to their own pregnancies. Nevertheless, emboldened state actors and increased surveillance of pregnancy have led to criminal charges against Texans who should have been excluded from prosecution.
The evidence from states such as Alabama and Oklahoma demonstrates that eliminating this protection from criminalization for pregnant people in Texas will potentially turn every miscarriage and stillbirth into a criminal investigation. Unfortunately, as Texas Monthly has recently reported, anti-abortion activists in Texas are threatening to undo this longstanding exception.
