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I'm Mark Joseph Stern, and this is Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, and the Supreme Court.

There's no shared right here.

When you introduce fetal personhood, you fundamentally change the legal rights and status of all pregnant women.

You force them to forfeit their personhood once this kind of fetal person has taken up residence inside their body.

The fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022 marked a dark turning point in American law.

With a single decision, the Supreme Court overturned 50 years of precedent protecting a woman's

right to reproductive choice. The ruling set off a high-stakes battle to restore abortion access

in red and purple states and drew attention to the life-threatening horrors

that these bans inflict on women with failing pregnancies.

But there's another threat to reproductive freedom in the United States,

and that's the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes,

prosecuting women for experiencing a miscarriage or stillbirth.

This has been going on since before the demise of Roe, something Georgetown Law professor

Michelle Goodwin documented in her renowned 2020 book Policing the Womb. But with Roe wiped

off the books, these prosecutions have ramped up. They aren't limited to red states either. In recent years,

we've seen prosecutors in deep blue states seek prison time for women who had a miscarriage or

stillbirth. Lawmakers around the country are developing new ways to punish women whose pregnancies

don't result in a healthy live birth.

Karen Thompson is on the front lines of the increasingly pitched battle to defend women being criminalized for their pregnancies.

She's the legal director of pregnancy justice,

a group that provides criminal defense to pregnant people

...