Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - Punished For Their Pregnancies
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 23 August 2025
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
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 attention.
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| 1:04.6 | I'm Mark Joseph Stern, and this is Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, and the Supreme Court. |
| 1:12.5 | There's no shared right here. |
| 1:15.3 | When you introduce fetal personhood, you fundamentally change the legal rights and status of all pregnant women. |
| 1:21.3 | You force them to forfeit their personhood once this kind of fetal person has taken up residence inside their body. |
| 1:30.9 | The fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022 marked a dark turning point in American law. |
| 1:36.7 | With a single decision, the Supreme Court overturned 50 years of precedent, protecting a woman's |
| 1:41.9 | right to reproductive choice. The ruling set off a high-stakes |
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