Punished For Their Pregnancies
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 23 August 2025
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Mark Joseph Stern, and this is Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, and the Supreme Court. |
| 0:12.1 | There's no shared right here. When you introduce fetal personhood, you fundamentally change the legal rights and status of all pregnant women. |
| 0:28.2 | You force them to forfeit their personhood once this kind of fetal person has taken up residence inside their body. |
| 0:35.8 | The fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022 marked a dark turning point in American law. |
| 0:39.1 | 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 |
| 0:44.7 | high-stakes battle to restore abortion access in red and purple states and drew attention to the |
| 0:50.4 | life-threatening horrors that these bans inflict on women with failing pregnancies. |
| 0:56.2 | But there's another threat to reproductive freedom in the United States, and that's the |
| 1:00.8 | criminalization of pregnancy outcomes, prosecuting women for experiencing a miscarriage or stillbirth. |
| 1:08.0 | This has been going on since before the demise of Roe, something Georgetown Law |
| 1:12.2 | Professor Michelle Goodwin documented in her renowned 2020 book Policing the Womb. But with Roe wiped off |
| 1:18.6 | the books, these prosecutions have ramped up. They aren't limited to red states either. In recent years, |
| 1:24.3 | we've seen prosecutors in deep blue states seek prison time for women who had a |
| 1:29.1 | miscarriage or stillbirth. Lawmakers around the country are developing new ways to punish women |
| 1:35.5 | whose pregnancies don't result in a healthy live birth. Karen Thompson is on the front lines of the |
| 1:42.0 | increasingly pitched battle to defend women being criminalized for their pregnancies. She's the front lines of the increasingly pitched battle to defend women being |
| 1:45.0 | criminalized for their pregnancies. She's the legal director of pregnancy justice, a group that |
| 1:50.2 | provides criminal defense to pregnant people and advocates for legal reforms to ensure that no one |
| 1:55.3 | loses their rights simply because they're pregnant. Karen, welcome to amicus. |
| 2:00.6 | Hey, Mark, Thanks for having me. |
| 2:02.3 | Appreciate being here. So I want to start with an overview of pregnancy criminalization because I think it gets a lot less |
| 2:09.2 | attention than the broader fight for abortion access. So broadly speaking, what is this line, |
... |
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