Two family law attorneys discussed how the criminalization of abortion increases surveillance of marginalized communities at an NYU Law event on Wednesday.
Guest speaker Valena Beety, co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project — a nonprofit that aims to free wrongfully convicted people — introduced her book titled “Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity.” Published in August, the book connects anti-abortion laws to a recent growth of convictions after miscarriages and increased state-level monitoring.
After Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, states with abortion bans categorized infant deaths, including stillbirths and miscarriages, as abuse of a corpse or manslaughter. According to the latest report by the legal advocacy group Pregnancy Justice, two years after the ruling, there have been 412 pregnancy related charged cases. 76.9% of pregnancy-related arrests occurred in a small number of states that expanded the definitions of child abuse to include fetuses, fertilized eggs and embryos.
Beety also emphasized that doctors and nurses in abortion-restricted states are scared to provide lifesaving care to mothers in cases where there is a high chance the pregnancy will not survive. She also noted that hospitals began allowing police into labor rooms after patients finish surgery to “interrogate” them.
“Doctors are even delaying care until they’ve talked to police and they have police on the scene,” Beety said in an interview with WSN. “There’s this combination of doctors who are scared and don’t know if they can continue to provide healthcare to their patients, and these doctors are opening the doors for law enforcement.”
Panelists highlighted to attendees that federal monitoring of reproductive health care enables interstate prosecution. Beety explained that people who receive medication in abortion-protected states are automatically listed in a nationwide prescription database accessible by the police. This surveillance system was used in more than half of the criminal charges against women upon returning to the more restricted state.
This comes after the passage of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act in 1974, which provided federal grants to states that established standards on defining and reporting child abuse. Critics, including event organizer and advocacy director to end family policing Miriam Mack, argued that this widespread surveillance launched a “family policing” system that surveys and separates marginalized families rather than improving child welfare.
“The family policing system is not focused on the issues that we know are responsible for massive child suffering, lack of housing, hunger, inability to access adequate healthcare, well-funded public schools, and instead it focuses on people,” Mack said in an interview with WSN. “If you are Black, if you are poor, if you are indigenous, if you are disabled, you will be targeted by the family policing system.”
Contact Caleb Garcia at [email protected].