Birthing people often experience severe mistreatment and forced interventions due to abortion criminalization and other forms of pregnancy criminalization. In Georgia, the abortion restrictions currently in place are based around the legal concept of “fetal personhood,” thus conferring legal rights and protections on an embryo or fetus during pregnancy.
The legal concept of "personhood" has implications beyond abortion care, such as the regulation of fertility treatment, or the potential criminalization of pregnancy complications like stillbirth and miscarriage. In Georgia, dozens of OB-GYNs have warned the state law interferes with patient care and could have disastrous impact on birthing people.
Noteworthy cases in GA:
Adriana Smith suffered a massive brain hemorrhage while nine weeks pregnant and was declared brain-dead. However, she was kept on life support for months and forced to give birth solely to support the potential viability of the fetus, due to the impacts of the criminalization of abortion (specifically fetal personhood as outlined Georgia’s restrictive abortion ban), 2025
Giving Birth
At no point in pregnancy do people lose their civil and human rights. Yet all over the world, people often experience mistreatment and violations of their rights during pregnancy, whether they experience a pregnancy loss, seek an abortion, or continue to birth. This reality is particularly present in the United States.
Georgia has the worst maternal mortality ratio of any state in the country. Black women in Georgia are 3.3 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women are. Georgia’s health experts believe that more than half of confirmed pregnancy-related deaths in the state are preventable. Public policies that seek to improve maternal health must be informed by evidence, including racial disparities due to systemic inequities, and uplift birthing peoples’ experiential expertise.
In August 2023, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released a report confirming that “one in 5 women report mistreatment while receiving maternity care” with that rate being higher for people of color.
Birthworkers outside the traditional health care system often support better pregnancy and birth experiences. Some birthworkers experience a higher likelihood of criminalization for working outside these traditional systems and endure more severe consequences. While advocacy carried out within the context of individual care is of great importance, it is critical to strive for larger structural change that targets the current healthcare system and broader systems of oppression, including racism, sexism, transphobia, and classism, all of which deeply inform and enable mistreatment during childbirth. Advocates for birth justice work to safeguard the rights of birthing people—especially Black and Brown birthing people and others who have been historically harmed—to make decisions around their pregnancies, including seeking abortions, and to have children in safe and supportive environments.
Many birth justice advocates emphasize that pregnant people understanding their rights, including informed consent, is one helpful intervention on the impacts of the criminalization on birthing people. These impacts more severely impact those who already experience increased criminalization, including Black, Indigenous, migrant, trans, and birthing people at the center of the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC).
Incarcerated birthing people experience the harshest impacts of criminalization due to their positionality as inherently criminalized individuals compounded with criminalizing factors experienced by pregnant people more generally. Medical, human rights, and legal organizations strongly oppose the shackling of pregnant women in prison, considering it a cruel and degrading practice and a potential violation of constitutional and international human rights protections. About 40 states, including Georgia (HB 345), have passed laws limiting the use of restraints, according to a Johns Hopkins University research group, but these laws are often not enforced within the walls of carceral institutions.