Using the criminal justice system to target poor and/or non-white pregnant women has a pretty long history in the US. One previously popular target was women who used illegal drugs while pregnant; however science has shown that the worries about fetal harm are myths:

In the vast majority of cases, exposure to drugs in utero does not result in the negative long-term effects legislators, and most of us, presume.14 Despite recent in-creases in methamphetamine and heroin use, cocaine remains the drug used most by pregnant women who come to the attention of authorities.15 Yet a recent longitudinal study concluded that children exposed to cocaine in their mother’s womb did not exhibit long-term developmental consequences, even in adulthood.16 Other similar studies on the effects of marijuana and opiate exposure in utero produced substantially similar results.

Then there is the ongoing attempt to ban mifepristone based partly on how women seeking chemical abortions don’t really deserve medical treatment:

Third, the Doctors are injured because they must divert time and resources away from their ordinary practice to treat mifepristone patients. In particular, the Doctors describe this treatment as often requiring extended physician attention, blood for transfusions, and other hospital resources. As one doctor testified:

When I must perform surgery [for] complications from chemical abortions, this takes attention away from my other patients. As a hospitalist, I am often supervising multiple laboring patients on labor and delivery. When I am called to the operating room to address an emergency resulting from chemical abortion, this necessarily means I may not be immediately available if an emergency should occur with one of my laboring patients.

The implication quite clearly is that women seeking—in this case, a chemical—abortion are doing something wrong.

Then there is all of the bullshit designed to turn a fetus into a victim of a criminal act:

If one of the major factors in criminalizing pregnancy was the war on drugs, the other was an ongoing wave of post-Roe feticide laws — which created a completely new class of crime victim, the fetus.

These laws often were passed under the auspices of protecting pregnant women, especially from domestic violence. There’s no arguing that people who are pregnant need protection. In the United States homicide is the leading cause of death among pregnant women. But the feticide laws didn’t work to make pregnant people safer, says Dana Sussman, acting executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, known as NAPW. “What these laws are then used for is actually to criminalize the pregnant person herself,” says Sussman.

The laws that were supposed to protect women from violence, instead became another way to criminalize pregnancy.

“The first sort of experiment in this area,” Sussman says, “were primarily drug- using Black women who were charged with crimes in relationship to their fetus.” Those crimes were often things like child abuse or child neglect — but there were also cases where the rhetoric of the war on drugs cases merged into the feticide statutes to create a perfect storm of policing pregnancy.

And then because of the “fetal personhood” utter bullshit you end up with this:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/16/brittany-watts-lawsuit-miscarriage-abuse-of-corpse

“This case is a perfect example of the broader implications of the overruling of Roe v Wade in the Dobbs case. Brittany was not seeking an abortion,” said Julia Rickert, one of Watts’s attorneys and a partner at the civil rights law firm Loevy and Loevy. “But the repercussions of the Dobbs decision meant that her pregnancy and her choices and her medical crisis were viewed in a different way.”

On 19 September 2023, when Watts was about 21 weeks into a wanted pregnancy, she went to the hospital after she started experiencing pain and bleeding, according to the lawsuit. Although she was showing signs of potential miscarriage, the lawsuit alleges that Watts “received no meaningful treatment or guidance”. She left the hospital after several hours, only to return the following day. Although a doctor told her that her pregnancy was in effect over and that she was at risk of hemorrhaging and sepsis, the lawsuit alleges that Watts once again did not receive adequate treatment for hours and left the hospital.

“Her womb was a death trap, essentially,” Rickert said.

In the early morning of 22 September 2023, Watts miscarried into her toilet (which is common in miscarriages). According to the lawsuit, she delivered an “already-deceased, under-one-pound fetus”, which she did not see. Watts attempted to flush and clean out the toilet, then went back to the hospital as she continued to bleed.

A nurse at the hospital contacted the hospital’s risk management department and called police, according to the lawsuit. She allegedly told the police that Watts had given birth at home, did not want the baby and did not know if the baby was alive. Another nurse also wrote a medical note that falsely suggested that Watts had seen and touched the fetus, the lawsuit alleged.

All of which leads us to Monday’s nonsense where President Grievance essentially told pregnant women not to take Tylenol

Kimmel's show put together a montage of Trump insisting dozens of times yesterday to "DON'T TAKE TYLENOL." Complete insanity.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-09-24T04:09:57.427Z

or they’d be responsible if their child had autism. And I know the Tylenol/autism nonsense is confusing because it’s all of pile of lies, but the message itself was clear:  if something goes wrong with a pregnancy, it’s the woman’s fault and she might be criminally liable.

And this all makes sense if you realize that the over-arching forced birth movement is a return to a kind of slavery:

When Amy Coney Barrett suggested that adoption and safe-haven laws were an adequate substitute for abortion care for people who did not want to be pregnant, she was essentially insisting that they do a kind of high-risk, uncompensated labor to produce a baby or child for adoptive families like hers.

[deletia]

Bridgewater’s with slavery is not an overreach. Denying abortion care particularly affects women of color and impoverished women. Black women are twice as likely as white women to seek an abortion in the United States, and according to the Guttmacher Institute, 75% of all people who get an abortion are poor or low income. Women strongly resist doing this forced labor; recently published studies found that in Texas, where the law has made abortion all-but-illegal, 90% of those whom statistics predict would get an abortion found a work-around (typically pills or services in a nearby state) and got abortion care anyway.

[deletia]

Pregnant people have always gotten abortions when they were not willing, able or prepared to have a child or assume the risks of pregnancy. The only reason we are willing to make people carry an unwanted pregnancy for ten months is because we devalue them. We don’t demand that anyone donate a kidney, even though adult humans die every day for want of one, and most of us have a spare. We don’t even compel people to donate a kidney after death — not for their partner or child, much less a stranger. Why do cadavers have a right to bodily integrity that living pregnant people do not? Misogyny, sex-shaming, and racism all play a role, as does the anti-abortion movement’s love affair with embryos and fetuses, as does the legacy of slavery, which taught us to be comfortable with forcing people to be pregnant against their will.

A policing post needs a song by The Police to close it: