Pregnancy

These stories cover pregnancy in its relation to legislation and sex discrimination, abortion access, parenting and everything in between. Because of U.S. laws that put fetuses’ health above the fundamental human rights of pregnant people, they are often treated as second-class citizens.

Massachusetts Decriminalized Later Abortion, No Health Emergency Required

PUBLISHED 9/2/2026 by

Massachusetts law no longer imposes a gestational-age limit on abortion—meaning for the first time, a woman in the state can choose to end her pregnancy at any point, without a prosecutor looking over her doctor’s shoulder.

Gov. Maura Healey (D) last month signed the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, joining nine other states—Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon and Vermon, plus D.C.—in trusting patients and medical professionals to make abortion decisions throughout pregnancy, rather than politicians, police and prosecutors.

In Massachusetts, the legislative hearings focused on women who experienced a severe fetal diagnosis or a threat to their own health and had to travel out of state for medical care, which are very sympathetic stories that were able to win over many supporters.

While it’s certainly important that states like Massachusetts have made later abortion more accessible to people experiencing health emergencies, the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act is important for everyone seeking later abortion care, whatever the reason.

Keshia Golden’s Plea Deal Kept Her Out of Prison—But Don’t Mistake It for Justice

PUBLISHED 8/31/2026 by

Keshia Golden’s attorneys say that in October 2022, while she was eight-plus months pregnant, her then-boyfriend Calvin Sidney hit her, grabbed her hair and slammed her head against a kitchen counter. Golden grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed Sidney in the leg. Golden only intended to make him stop, she has always insisted. But she hit the femoral artery. Sidney died at a Chicago hospital.

Keshia Golden was charged with first-degree murder and held in jail, where, weeks from giving birth, she was transferred to the medical unit to recover from her injuries. Four years passed.

Then, on Aug. 24, 2026, just before Golden’s trial was to begin, the Cook County state’s attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke offered Golden a last-minute deal: If she pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter and underwent two years of community service, drug testing and probation, she would serve no prison time.

All evidence points to the fact that Golden acted in self-defense and should never have been charged in the first place.

Nonetheless, she accepted the plea.

Her acceptance of this lesser charge is not an admission of guilt. It’s also not justice.

Golden is a single mother who was forced to make an impossible choice to ensure she would be able to raise her 3-year-old daughter. “All she has is me,” Golden said in court. 

Now, the only remaining path to justice for Golden is a pardon from Gov. JB Pritzker. Such a pardon would send a clear message: No woman should have to die to prove that she was a victim. No one should be punished for surviving abuse, defending themselves or protecting their child.

Beyond Abortion: How the ERA Could Transform Pregnancy, Work and Family Life

PUBLISHED 8/26/2026 by

On Women’s Equality Day, the unfinished fight for constitutional equality extends far beyond abortion. State equal rights amendments—and, ultimately, a robust federal ERA—could reshape how the law treats pregnancy, motherhood, work and family life.

Ming-Qi Chu, deputy director of the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU, says state ERAs could be used to counter discrimination against pregnant women. Chu uses the example of a Tennessee case last year where a pregnant woman was denied prenatal care because she was unmarried.

“If they’re only asking about marriage in the specific context of pregnancy, then they’re treating pregnancy differently from other medical conditions,” she says. “And the other theory [of discrimination] is that they’re asking this question because they want women to be married before getting pregnant, enforcing the stereotype that only married women should receive prenatal care or should have pregnancies that are recognized.”

“I can imagine a robust ERA that says that it is a violation of our equality rights to die or to face the risk of dying from something that one of the wealthiest nations in the world should have rendered as an anomaly, as an exceptional circumstance that just doesn’t happen here anymore,” University of California, Berkeley, law professor Khiara M. Bridges says.

“The ERA can give us a real basis for making more intersectional arguments about equality, and pushing courts to consider the intersection of sex discrimination and race discrimination in ways that they have been unwilling to do until now.”

How Abortion Restrictions Exacerbate America’s Affordability Crisis

PUBLISHED 8/25/2026 by and

Few decisions carry more weight than whether or when to have a child. Women who decide to end a pregnancy are making an intensely personal, at times deeply emotional, decision. They deserve quality care, compassion and respect. Instead, under the Trump administration, abortion restrictions are expanding and options for care are disappearing.

Four years after the Supreme Court’s  Dobbs ruling, abortion care comes with a maze of logistical and financial hurdles.

A new study from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) concluded Widespread abortion restrictions across numerous states and the rollback of federal funding and protections costs our country $140 billion annually. And the 16 states with the most restrictive abortion policies cost the national economy nearly $68 billion annually in lost earnings.

In the U.S. today, abortion is increasingly reserved for those who can find and pay for it.

We urge new thinking: Instead of a return to the  Roe v. Wade era ripe with restrictions and hurdles, let’s govern expansively. We envision a supportive government that makes abortion accessible to anyone who needs it.

‘It’s Killing the Women You Represent’: Texas Widower’s Plea to Lawmakers to End Abortion Ban

PUBLISHED 8/21/2026 by

After his 35-year-old wife bled to death from a miscarriage in a Houston-area hospital, a Texas father is suing—and taking her story to Capitol Hill.

“Choosing to bring new life into the world shouldn’t be a death sentence,” insisted Michelle Maloney, the San Antonio attorney working to bring justice to Texas widower Hope Ngumezi and his two young sons.

Three years ago, in June 2023, Hope’s beloved wife Porsha was happily expecting the couple’s third child until she began to miscarry at 11 weeks pregnant. The healthy 35-year-old finance manager for a charter school went to the emergency room at Houston Methodist Sugar Land Hospital, just 10 minutes from her home in suburban Houston.

Both she and Hope were certain that she would receive the safe and critical medical care that she needed as she passed fetal tissue and blood clots the size of grapefruits at the hospital. An ultrasound confirmed that she had partially miscarried and that her fetus no longer had a heartbeat. But the heavy bleeding didn’t stop.

Still, the hospital’s OB-GYN, who examined her just once, moved Porsha from the ER—where staff were equipped to respond to emergencies—to a regular floor, where she received less monitoring. Porsha arrived at the hospital at 3:37 p.m. By 2 a.m., she began gasping for air and within minutes, she had died of hemorrhage.

A dozen doctors who reviewed her medical records for ProPublica, which broke the story about her death, said that Porsha should have urgently received a very simple and standard procedure for a miscarriage—a D&C (dilation and curettage). The 10-15 minute D&C would have removed all remaining fetal tissue in her womb, which her uterus was trying to expel with heavy contractions and bleeding. The procedure would have stopped the bleeding.

“The poor thing bled to death for lack of a D&C. It’s atrocious,” Austin OB-GYN Nancy Binford told Courier Texas.

Detaining Families, Policing Pregnancy: Trump’s Immigration Crackdown on Women and Children

PUBLISHED 8/12/2026 by

Trump’s latest attacks on birthright citizenship are part of a much broader effort to police American identity, punish migrant women for entering the U.S. and ultimately regulate their reproduction. Immigrant women and children remain particular targets of a hostile immigration system that seeks to control them through detention, family separation and deportation. The administration’s reinstatement of family detention has made it possible to incarcerate whole families while avoiding the political backlash generated by the “zero tolerance” separations of Trump’s first term.

But detaining families together does not make detention humane. Family residential facilities expose mothers and children to interrupted medical care, inadequate health screenings, poor living conditions and lasting physical and psychological harm. Women—particularly those who are pregnant, postpartum or caring for young children—also face heightened vulnerability to neglect and abuse inside a system where government officers and private contractors wield enormous power over their daily lives.

These policies are not simply about immigration enforcement. They are a means of penalizing pregnancy, motherhood and family formation in immigrant communities. From attacks on birthright citizenship to the detention of pregnant women and U.S.-citizen children, the administration is using the immigration system to make migration more painful and precarious—and to enact that punishment on the bodies and families of migrant women.

My Hysterectomy Was a Gift. Dr. Kemi Doll Shows Why Women Need to Share Our ‘Womb Stories’

PUBLISHED 8/8/2026 by

Determined to prevent uterine cancer deaths, Dr. Doll published A Terrible Strength: The Hidden Crisis of the Black Womb and Your Survival Guide to Healing in May. Both comprehensive and compassionate, the book focuses on individuals of African descent, showing how everyone will benefit.

Upon finishing A Terrible Strength, I took its message to heart: One need not have a womb to prioritize womb health. We can all join Kemi Doll’s Womb Sisterhood through the “deliberate telling and sharing” of “womb stories” with “our true friends.” 

Fortunately, women have already started talking. Personal testimonies changed health outcomes in the 1970s and ’80s—and they’re doing the same now. Earlier generations suffered through perimenopause in silence, but today, women in their 20s, 30s and 40s hear about not only hot flashes but also itchy ears and frozen shoulders. And, as a woman in my early 50s, I’m not completely in the dark about hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

Nevertheless, deadly silence remains.

I am childfree by choice, so pregnancy never fueled my concerns, but I became preoccupied with gynecology in 2017. Fibroids were wreaking havoc in my life, and I pursued a hysterectomy to end my suffering. As Doll puts it, this “definitive treatment” is “welcomed by some and mourned by others.” Though I very much welcomed a hysterectomy, I couldn’t secure one until May 2021, despite my best efforts. 

From now on, I will participate in the “deliberate telling and sharing” of “womb stories.” Doing so is difficult but necessary. As Doll explains, sharing our experience requires us to “shift away from a strength that withstands suffering, silence and pain.” It requires, in her words, “a strength that embraces our vulnerability and can demand better care from the larger world.”

The Myth of the ‘Perfect Birth’: What America Gets Wrong About Pregnancy, Birth and Maternal Care

PUBLISHED 7/26/2026 by

Project 2026’s pronatalist vision insists that America needs more babies—but largely ignores the conditions that make pregnancy and childbirth unnecessarily dangerous in the first place. In this interview with Ms., The Perfect Birth Myth co-authors Avital Norman Nathman and Deborah Wage argue that improving maternal health requires more than rhetoric about “family values.” It demands investments in midwives, doulas, paid family leave, prenatal and postpartum care, and policies that address the racial and economic inequities driving the nation’s maternal mortality crisis.

Drawing on surveys of nearly 3,000 parents and healthcare providers, Nathman and Wage dismantle persistent myths about birth while exposing the structural failures of the U.S. maternity care system—from hospital closures and Medicaid cuts to the medical establishment’s resistance to alternative models of care. They explain why Black women continue to face disproportionately poor outcomes regardless of income or education, why conservative pronatalist policies fall short, and what it would take to build a maternal healthcare system that truly supports families.

Why Attacks on Immigrant Communities Are Reproductive Justice Issues

PUBLISHED 7/22/2026 by , and

“It’s hell.”

That’s how our colleague, Miri, described her months-long detention in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, last year, separated from her husband and four children. Food was inedible, medications were inaccessible and women were forced to share beds and blankets due to overcrowding. She witnessed guards sexually assault women and conduct invasive strip searches. Pregnant and breastfeeding people were neglected: One new mother suffered from mastitis, while another woman in labor was ignored for hours before being taken to a hospital. 

These horrors, perpetrated by immigration enforcement officers, are exactly what the federal government approved billions to fund this summer. 

Reproductive justice is often reduced to abortion rights. But the movement has always taken a broader view. Created by 12 Black women organizers, the reproductive justice framework is about the right to have—or to not have—children and the right to raise them in safe, healthy communities. Detentions, deportations and disruption of care are part of a broader effort to limit who can fully belong, safely build a family and have rights in the United States. 

So who deserves safety and belonging in the U.S.? 

Antiabortion Extremists Can’t Target Abortion Pill Prescribers If They Don’t Know Their Names

PUBLISHED 7/17/2026 by

Four years after the fall of Roe, telemedicine is not just a convenience. For thousands of women, it is the best or only option.

Telemedicine’s success means that antiabortion threats have grown more sophisticated and intense. Pregnancy is statistically the most dangerous time in a violent relationship. Patients seeking abortion care also risk harassment and violence from hostile partners, as well as abortion opponents, and in the worst cases, life-threatening violence. A pill bottle with your name on it is evidence that can be used with threats to expose you to your employer, your family, immigration authorities or a stranger on social media.

We have developed legislation that would better safeguard the privacy of people seeking abortion care by allowing patients and providers to choose not to have their names appear on pill packaging. Our organization is currently working to pass this legislation in several states.

As Dr. Mary Applegate, a public health physician who testified in favor of such a bill in New York, spelled out: Allowing the use of a pseudonym on prescription labels can be a matter of life and death.