Author: Lynn M. Paltrow

Lynn M. Paltrow is a lawyer and the founder of Pregnancy Justice, formerly National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

Project 2025 Would Establish an Unborn Uber Class

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Mostly without using the term “person,” Project 2025 lays out a plan for the next conservative president to use the federal government’s executive powers to enact nationwide policies that treat fertilized eggs as persons without needing to rely on courts or legislatures to achieve their goal—overriding the majority of Americans who oppose these measures.

Project 2025 would undermine public health, destroy and degrade women’s lives and inevitably lead to their criminalization.

We must understand Project 2025 as the culmination of the radical personhood agenda, launched in the 1970s, significantly advanced in 2022 by the Supreme Court decision overturning of Roe v. Wade and now poised to be fully achieved if Donald Trump is elected.  

Criminalization of Pregnant Women Skyrockets, Based on the Legal Fiction of ‘Fetal Personhood’

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New research reveals at least 210 women faced criminal charges because of their pregnancies or pregnancy outcomes in the year after Dobbs—the highest number of documented prosecutions in a single year. The real number is likely much higher, according to new research released by Pregnancy Justice.

“Our new report shows how the Dobbs decision emboldened prosecutors to develop ever more aggressive strategies to prosecute pregnancy, leading to the most pregnancy-related criminal cases on record,” said Lourdes A. Rivera, president of Pregnancy Justice. “Being pregnant places people at increased risk, not only of dire health outcomes, but of arrest.”

New York’s Prop 1 Closes the ‘Pregnancy’ Loophole—Protecting More Than Abortion

No one—not even New Yorkers—can count on having a right to an abortion. This is why, New Yorkers must vote yes on Prop 1 to “protect abortion permanently.”

Proposal 1, however, does far more than establish constitutional protection for abortion. New York’s Prop 1 explicitly protects women who experience miscarriages and stillbirths, as well as those who carry their pregnancies to term and give birth. Prop 1 will also ensure equality for all those who want to travel—even if they happen to be pregnant. Proposal 1 will, for the first time, close the pregnancy loophole that has been used to deny pregnant patients equal rights to follow their religious beliefs.

How Abortion Protects Us From the Choices We Can’t Make

I was thrilled to hear DNC speakers say the word “abortion,” speaking up on behalf of reproductive freedom. But I tensed up whenever someone spoke in terms of protecting women’s “decisions” about pregnancy.

There is a lot about pregnancy that happens in the absence of any decision at all, or in spite of the decisions people make—like an ectopic pregnancy, or a spontaneous miscarriage, or pregnancy as a result of sexual abuse. That’s why we must ensure that the law, something we can control, does not cruelly add to families’ experiences of powerlessness, pain and loss.

Criminalizing Drugs—Including Misoprostol and Mifepristone—Is a Bad Idea

Recently, Louisiana added misoprostol and mifepristone (“M&M”) to the state’s list of criminalized controlled substances. M&M are medications that, among other things, can safely and effectively end a pregnancy. As a result of this law, possession of these medications without a prescription can result in fines of up to $5,000 or “imprisonment of no more than five years with or without hard labor.”

Much of the outcry against this state action has focused on the fact that M&M are neither dangerous nor addictive and thus should not be categorized or criminalized as a controlled substance. While it is true that M&M, two exceptionally well-studied and approved medications, are extremely safe and lack any potential for addiction, this critique reinforces dangerous myths about the war on drugs already deeply intertwined with the war on abortion.

The Florida Supreme Court Didn’t Just Uphold a Six-Week Ban—It Denied Women Their Constitutional Privacy

Adopted by Florida voters in 1980, Article 23 of Florida’s Constitution states: “Every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into the person’s private life except as otherwise provided herein.” 

By compelling a woman to continue her pregnancy, Florida denies women exactly the kind of privacy it says its Constitution protects. 

My Thanks to Dobbs

The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs has done a much better job than I ever did to raise public consciousness about the connections between abortion, pregnancy and pregnancy loss. For more than 30 years, I have tried to communicate the fact that abortion and pregnancy are not separate issues and that all people with the capacity for pregnancy—not just those seeking to end a pregnancy—would be harmed by the loss of Roe.

Dobbs however is doing a wonderful job helping people see the connections—from the state of Texas denying Kate Cox the right to end a pregnancy with a fetus that had no chance of survival, to skilled medical professionals fleeing states where they face arrest and financial ruin for providing medical care to pregnant patients.

Why I Refuse to Feel Hopeless About the Texas Abortion Case

Why I Refuse to Feel Hopeless About the Texas Abortion Case

I refuse to feel hopeless about the fact that Texas has, for now, successfully banned abortion in that state. Already, the Department of Justice has sued Texas over its restrictive new abortion law, saying the state legislature enacted the statute “in open defiance of the Constitution.”

I do not predict another civil war, but I do know there will be a reckoning. Sometimes a loss opens the door to something better in the future. Before then, though, there will be enormous suffering. But, as we have seen before, no prohibition and no amount of pain or fear will ever stop a movement for fundamental human rights.