Punished For Their Pregnancies

Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts

Slate Podcasts

News Commentary, News, Politics, Government

4.6 • 3.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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. Want more Amicus? Join Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes with exclusive legal analysis. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Do you want to be part of the future of industry?
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0:20.0	Welcome to Germany's Reiniches-Rivier. Be part of this exciting backed by a budget of 15 billion euros for transformation.
0:23.3	Welcome to Germany's Reinishes Rivier.
0:26.0	Be part of this exciting investment hub.
0:29.9	Find us on be part of it.nrw.
0:40.5	I'm Mark Joseph Stern, and this is Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, and the Supreme Court.
0:44.9	There's no shared right here.
0:50.7	When you introduce fetal personhood, you fundamentally change the legal rights and status of all pregnant women.
0:56.5	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
1:05.1	in American law. With a single decision, the Supreme Court overturned 50 years of precedent,
1:13.1	protecting a woman's right to reproductive choice.
1:18.9	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.
1:26.4	But there's another threat to reproductive freedom in the United States,
1:30.3	and that's the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes,
1:33.3	prosecuting women for experiencing a miscarriage or stillbirth.
1:37.3	This has been going on since before the demise of Roe,
1:41.3	something Georgetown Law professor Michelle Goodwin documented in her renowned
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