Amicus | Punished For Their Pregnancies

Women were prosecuted for experiencing miscarriage or stillbirth
even before the Supreme Court swept away the protections of Roe v.
Wade. But these prosecutions have ramped up since, in both red and
blue states. The stakes are ramping up too, with legislators
introducing bills that would treat abortion as homicide,
potentially subjecting patients to the death penalty. This week,
Mark Joseph Stern talks with Karen Thompson, the legal director of
Pregnancy Justice. They discuss what happens when the state decides
a fetus, or even an embryo, has equal or greater rights than
pregnant people. As fetal personhood legislation moves ahead in
more and more red states, this concept is also seeping into the law
in blue states. Women have been jailed because their pregnancies
ended in a way the state disliked. Grandmothers have been
prosecuted decades after pregnancy loss thanks to investigators
using forensic genetic genealogy to hunt them down. As Thompson
explains, a frightening frontier in the battle for bodily autonomy
and reproductive rights is here, and it demands our
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