Abortion bans criminalize pregnant people and put their lives at risk regardless of what kind of health care they access (or don’t access). These bans delay emergency medical care and force pregnant people to carry dangerous pregnancies.
The results are tragic, and often preventable. From heartbreaking delays in emergency care to lives forever altered by denied treatments, abortion bans lead to traumatic experiences, devastating long-term health outcomes, and tragic, preventable death.
According to a Gender Equity Policy Institute report that came out this year,
Pregnant people living in states that banned abortion nearly 2x as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or soon after giving birth, compared to pregnant people living in supportive states where abortion was legal and accessible.
Maternal mortality fell 21% in supportive states (states with no abortion bans in place) post-Dobbs .
Black pregnant people living in banned states were 3.3x as likely to die as White pregnant people in those states.
Noteworthy cases in GA of pregnancy criminalization fall under all of these categories:
Pregnancy
All Georgians deserve to have autonomy and dignity in our reproductive lives—no matter what we look like, where we live, or how much money we make.
Medical decisions should stay where they belong: between patients, their families, and their providers. Not the state.
No one should face arrest or investigation for the decisions they make during their pregnancy. Pregnant people deserve compassion and care that meets them where they are at and their life circumstances without stigmatizing, demonizing or criminalizing.
A common way pregnancy or pregnant people are criminalized is for drug use during pregnancy (often white folks). Also for pregnancy loss (most often BIPOC folks) and charging folks with things like “abuse of a corpse”, manslaughter or homicide, etc., according to the work of Dorothy Roberts.
Hospital drug testing of pregnant people, which began in the 1980s and spread rapidly during the opioid epidemic, was intended in part to help identify babies who might experience withdrawal symptoms and need extra medical care. Federal law requires hospitals to alert child welfare agencies anytime such babies are born. But a previous investigation by The Marshall Project and Reveal found that the relatively inexpensive, pee-in-a-cup tests favored by many hospitals are highly susceptible to false positives, errors and misinterpretation — and many hospitals have failed to put in place safeguards that would protect patients from being reported over faulty test results. In some cases examined by The Marshall Project, doctors and social workers did not review patient medications to find the cause of a positive test. In others, providers suspected a medication they prescribed could be the culprit, but reported patients to authorities anyway.
Despite these warnings, hospitals often lack policies requiring providers to review a patient’s records to see what medications they received before reporting them to authorities. Mandatory reporting laws protect doctors from liability for reports made “in good faith,” even if they turn out to be wrong. And toxicologists and doctors say many doctors lack the time and expertise needed to adequately interpret drug test results.
At many hospitals, it is social workers — responsible for contacting child welfare agencies — who are more likely to pay attention to drug test results. Some hospitals require social workers to automatically file a report for any positive test, while other facilities first perform an assessment to determine whether a parent might be a risk to the baby.
Georgia is surrounded by states that currently criminalize pregnant people who use drugs, including Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Carolina, under fetal personhood laws, which are promoted by anti-abortion advocates and legislators to move abortion bans forward, or chemical endangerment laws, which specifically target people who use drugs while pregnant.