Some states are turning miscarriages and stillbirths into criminal cases against women

States across the country have been using a series of laws and court rulings in the past decade to criminalize how women react to pregnancy loss. Legal experts say the fear and suspicion following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that allowed states to ban abortion may be making things … Read more

‘One death is too many’: abortion bans usher in US maternal mortality crisis

In Louisiana, doctors will no longer be able to carry a lifesaving medication with them during pregnancy emergencies. In Texas, the infant mortality rate is soaring. In Idaho, pregnant people drive hours just to give birth. And in Oklahoma and Georgia, women are bleeding out in hospital parking lots and facing dangerous infections before they … Read more

These Moms Smoked Weed Legally. Then Their Kids Were Taken Away

In a post-Dobbs world — and in an era of so-called fetal personhood, the conservative ideology that grants legal rights to infants not yet born — that risk becomes more real every day. States like Mississippi and South Carolina are already using “chemical endangerment” laws to prosecute women criminally for prenatal drug use. In Oklahoma … Read more

Inside a medical practice sending abortion pills to states where they’re banned

“These websites are breaking the law … aiding and abetting crimes in Texas,” says John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life. “We want to use all the instruments that we have, all the tools available, to really fight against this new trend of abortion pills by mail.” Seago says providers should still be … Read more

Conservative US lawmakers are pushing for an end to no-fault divorce

Defenders of the laws, which states started passing a half-century ago, see legislation and arguments to repeal them as the latest effort to restrict women’s rights – following the overturning of Roe v Wade and passage of abortion bans around the country – and say that without such protections, the country would return to an … Read more

Her abortion experience was ‘bizarre and painful’. Now she’s suing Tennessee

In the nearly two years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, 16 states have implemented near-total abortion bans. In theory, these bans have exceptions that permit people to get medically necessary abortions – but in practice, doctors and patients say, these exceptions are worded so vaguely that they are unworkable, prompting doctors … Read more

This Lawmaker Wants to Jail People for Watching Porn

Dusty Deevers is a fundamentalist preacher. He’s also a state senator. And he insists he doesn’t see “any firewalls” between his two roles — as he crusades to outlaw porn, end what he decries as the “abortion holocaust,” and abolish no-fault divorce in Oklahoma. He argues that the sole purpose of government is to “promote … Read more

Breaking: Travel bans proposed in Tennessee & Oklahoma

I want to be clear: When I say these laws target anyone who “helps” a teen get an abortion, I don’t just mean someone who physically takes them out of the state. You could be arrested for lending a teenager gas money, or texting them the url of an out-of-state clinic. That’s because both Tennessee’s … Read more

They were prosecuted for using drugs while pregnant. But it may not have been a crime.

Some local investigators and prosecutors are pursuing similar cases in Alabama, Oklahoma and South Carolina. They are policing pregnant people under an expanded interpretation of child abuse and neglect laws — even if parents birthed healthy babies, according to an investigation by The Marshall Project, Mississippi Today, AL.com, The Frontier and The Post & Courier. … Read more