Jeanne Flavin, professor of sociology at Fordham University is the featured speaker for this Diversity & Justice Speaker Series event.
The campaign to strip women of fundamental rights gained strength with the rise of the Tea Party in 2009 and the 2016 presidential election. But this effort has been underway for at least 30 years. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, abortion opponents leveraged widespread ignorance and hostility aimed at poor Black women who used cocaine and gave birth to rally support for laws and policies that attempted to establish rights for the embryo or fetus separate from the pregnant woman herself, in as many contexts as possible.
Today, feticide, child endangerment, and other laws are being used as the basis for arresting pregnant people -- including women who have no intention of ending a pregnancy -- and new mothers. The underpinning assumption of these arrests is that a pregnant person’s actions and inactions, indeed, the very state of being pregnant, constitute some sort of actual or possible harm to a child. A review of hundreds of these cases reveals that Black and low-income women have been disproportionately singled out, though significant numbers of poor White women have been arrested too.
A disturbing number of these cases involve women who have been reported to the police and other punitive authorities by health care workers. Upon becoming pregnant, people should reasonably expect that their medical health is a private matter, and that they retain their right to health care provider-patient confidentiality, informed consent, and other important rights. This presentation draws upon these occasions of health care workers’ reporting pregnant patients and new mothers to the police to highlight the stakes in the fight for the personhood of people with the capacity for pregnancy and to suggest ways of mobilizing for change.
