Criminalizing Pregnancy

Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, abortion providers and their patients now face criminal punishment and civil liabilities in a growing number of anti-choice states. But this criminalization of pregnancy is nothing new: pregnant people, and particularly women of color, have long faced investigation, arrest, jailing, prosecution, and prison time in connection with their pregnancies. What are the customs and laws that allow pregnant people to be blamed, investigated, and punished for pregnancy outcomes, including miscarriage? How can we work toward a future where safe reproductive care and bodily sovereignty are the standard for all?

About the Speakers:

Khiara M. Bridges is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. She has written many articles concerning race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Her scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, the NYU Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review, among others. She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). She is a coeditor of a reproductive justice book series that is published under the imprint of the University of California Press.

Irin Carmon is a senior correspondent at New York magazine, where she covers gender, law, politics, and more. She is the co-author of the New York Times bestselling book Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her next book, currently in progress, will be Unbearable: Being Pregnant in America.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin is the Linda D. & Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy at Georgetown Law. She is also Co-Faculty Director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Previously, she served as a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine where she was the founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy. Professor Goodwin is the author of Policing The Womb: Invisible Women and The Criminalization of Motherhood.  She is also host of the popular podcast On The Issues at Ms. Magazine.

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