This essay explores the legal architecture and growth of these ideas, both after Roe and after Dobbs, in three parts. It argues that, in an era in which suspicion about pregnancy loss seems to be growing, prosecutions involving pregnancy that
Mental health conditions, including deaths by suicide and overdose, are among the leading causes of pregnancy-related deaths in the United States. These are not mystifying realities but preventable tragedies: foreseeable outcomes of laws and policies that prioritize harm and punishment
Legal fetal ‘personhood’ is the idea that every single stage of fetal life, including the collection of cells formed at conception, is entitled to all the same legal rights as already born people. This concept makes no legal sense, any