Advocacy group resists attempts to criminalize pregnancy

Pregnancy Justice has focused historically on substance abuse, but abortion rights has come to their attention since Dobbs

Groups that have worked to maintain the rights of expectant and new mothers have long played a central role in ensuring that women are treated fairly by law enforcement. Pregnancy Justice, one such organization, provides criminal defense to people that seek to minimize the harm done by the government policing the family. They aim to keep families together. 

I spoke to Lauren Wranosky, a policy and program associate with the group, about their work. They recently gathered a new report to be released in the Fall that showed statistics about criminal justice and motherhood tallied from 2005 to 2020. They tracked the arrests of pregnant people. 

They possess figures that date earlier than that time though. From Roe until 2020, they project there were nearly 1700 such cases. In 80 percent of the cases, there was some allegation of substance abuse. 

“With respect to abortion rights, we are seeing that if there are abortion bans, this will just make it just that more easy to criminalize any pregnancy outcome,” Wranosky said. 

They extended their study to the time of the Dobbs decision. Currently, they are monitoring the number of criminal cases that have arisen due to abortions. They haven’t seen a spike in that type of litigation. 

“That might change,” Wranosky said. “And so that's why we're doing real-time tracking to see how that might change in the upcoming years.” 

In addition to representing pregnant women in situations involving drugs, Pregnancy Justice also works on legislative strategy and lobbying. They fought against Wyoming’s medication abortion law. 

“There is still some vagueness in the way that these bills are being written. And that is extremely troubling,” Wranosky said. 

Overzealous prosecutors are one of the anticipated challenges to reproductive rights going forward. Someone may want to grandstand in order to get elected. In staunchly anti-abortion areas, there may be a benefit to doing so. 

“No matter what, they are going to try to criminalize this person, no matter how many arguments we can make against it,” Wranosky said. “And so I think the political incentive is a huge part and that might increase the number of times this would happen in the future.”