More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Anti-abortion and right-wing prosecutors and law enforcement agencies are warping child neglect, abuse and endangerment statutes to criminalize behavior during and after pregnancy.
Dobbs “will further accelerate an existing crisis, putting anyone who is pregnant or has the capacity to become pregnant at even greater risk of arrest, prosecution, and conviction,” according to a new report from Pregnancy Justice.
The Pregnant Worker Fairness Act (PWFA) went into effect this summer. Perimenopause and menopause are related to workers’ reproductive lives and capacity for pregnancy. The inclusion of these terms will provide valuable guidance to employers and the millions of affected workers.
A new Pregnancy Justice report illustrates an alarming rise in pregnancy criminalization, increasing three-fold over the past 16 years. The report finds that just five Southern states are largely responsible for this increase in arrests.
Despite the major concerns brought forth in the report, feminist organizers are not backing down. Instead, they see the findings as “a call to action, and anyone working to achieve greater bodily autonomy ought to heed that call.”
An expectation of sacrificial motherhood may explain why eating while pregnant is such a fraught affair. On the food-related anxieties and pressure placed onto pregnant women:
“I discovered that “eating for two” is an anachronism, a unicorn, a thing from a svelter (or hungrier) past. … The pressure for mothers to modify their behaviors based on poorly understood risks plays out in the way that women are ‘educated’ about eating.
“Mothers are exhorted to optimize every dimension of children’s lives beginning in the womb. Good mothering is construed as behavior that reduces even minuscule or poorly understood risks to offspring, regardless of potential cost to the mother.”
Psychotherapist Amira Martin knew that it made sense to move slowly when starting a new relationship, but after a whirlwind romance, she married a man she’d known for less than a year. After all, the courtship had been perfect—indeed, the man himself appeared perfect—and however improbable, Martin believed that she had found her soul mate.
She hadn’t.
Amira Martin spoke with Ms. about her marriage, its dissolution, and what she learned from it.
Late Tuesday night, Iowa’s state legislature voted to ban most abortions after around six weeks of pregnancy. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) will sign the bill on Friday, and it will take immediate effect. Once passed, there will be two states—Iowa and Georgia—that ban abortion after around six weeks since a person’s last menstrual period. Total bans are in effect in 14 additional states: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
Laws that restrict abortion in this way rely on “scientific” claims that have very little grounding in actual science, and fly in the face of medical expertise. After all, most women don’t even know they’re pregnant when only six weeks along.
As Southern states continue to shut down abortion clinics, and medical care providers leave states with abortion bans, it is vital to establish a national right to abortion through the Women’s Health Protection Act.
An Ohio court of appeals unanimously overturned a pregnant woman’s conviction under the state’s “Corrupting Another with Drugs” law last month in a rare post-Dobbs win for the rights of pregnant people. Prosecutors in Ohio—and elsewhere—have increasingly sought to “protect” fetuses by manipulating state laws initially passed to protect pregnant people themselves from harm.
Though prosecutors have vowed to appeal the ruling vacating Hollingshead’s conviction, the Ohio court’s decision could help slow the march towards criminalizing pregnant women.
One year ago this month, the U.S. Supreme Court abandoned 50 years of precedent and held there is no federal constitutional right to abortion.
Fortunately, the Dobbs majority opinion is not the last word on how other jurists will interpret constitutional guarantees that protect reproductive autonomy. With active cases in 19 states challenging abortion bans since Dobbs, debates over the constitutional meaning of life, liberty, equality and reproductive rights are now taking shape in state courts. And, as new research shows, many state courts have already decided that state equal protection provisions, equal rights amendments, and other state constitutional guarantees are not constrained by federal precedent and require robust, independent legal standards to address sex discrimination.
In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.
This week: Rhode Island expands guaranteed abortion coverage; PEN America and Penguin Random House file lawsuit against Florida book ban, while NAACP issues Florida travel ban; Michigan protects abortion patients from employment discrimination; rock fans mourn the death of star Tina Turner; South Carolina votes to pass six-week abortion ban; HIV infections decreased in the U.S.; and more.
