(NewsNation) — The number of women charged with pregnancy-related crimes hit a record high in the year following the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled to remove the national right to an abortion in June 2022. Advocacy group Pregnancy Justice compiled pregnancy-related prosecutions between the ruling and June 2023.
That period yielded at least 210 prosecutions, with the majority of cases coming from Alabama (104) and Oklahoma (68). Ten came from South Carolina, seven from Ohio, six from Mississippi and another six from Texas.
That’s the highest number the group has identified over any 12-month period in research projects that have looked back as far as 1973.
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Researchers say the record-high total is actually an undercount, adding that the “team continues to uncover additional cases initiated during this period and will add them to the dataset as part of a comprehensive three-year report published at the end of the study.”
Here’s how the roughly 220 prosecutions break down:
198 allege child abuse, neglect or endangerment
Nine charges of criminal homicide
Eight drug charges
One charge of abuse of corpse
One abortion-specific crime, under a now-repealed criminal abortion statute
Zenovia Earle, media and communications director for Pregnancy Justice, told The Guardian such prosecutions can be based on “someone’s perceptions of risky behavior, however, they might define it, and it’s often based on stereotypes or outdated notions.”
“Prosecutors overwhelmingly charged pregnant people with offenses that allow them to obtain convictions without having to prove that the pregnant person harmed the fetus or infant,” the study reads, citing that 191 of 220 total charges lacked “a harm requirement.”
One of the lead researchers, Wendy Bach, told the Associated Press that one of the cases involved a woman delivering a stillborn baby at her home roughly six months into pregnancy.
When that woman went to make funeral arrangements, the funeral home reported her and authorities charged her with homicide — one of 22 cases in the study involving the death of a fetus or infant.
A majority, 143, of the defendants are white, while thirty were Black, thirteen were Native American and nine were Latinx. Another 15 did not have demographic information available.
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The researchers caution that the tally of cases from June 24, 2022, through June 23, 2023, is an undercount, as were earlier versions. As a result, they can’t be positive there wasn’t a stretch between 1973 and 2022 with as many cases as after the Dobbs ruling. During the earlier period, they found more than 1,800 cases — peaking at about 160 in 2015 and 2017.
Several states have laws that give fetuses at least some rights of people, and the concept received broad attention earlier this year when Alabama clinics suspended offering in vitro fertilization after a state Supreme Court ruling recognized embryos as “extrauterine children” in a wrongful death case brought by couples whose frozen embryos were destroyed in an accident.
Within weeks, the Republicans who control the state government adopted a law to protect IFV providers from legal liability.
“We really need to separate health care from punishment,” Rivera said. “This just has tragic endings and does not properly address the problem. It creates more problems.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
