The ‘Pregnancy Police’ Were Around Long Before Roe v. Wade Fell

For decades, pregnant people have been arrested, charged with various crimes and jailed for their pregnancy outcomes.

A 27-year-old white woman from Tennessee attempted suicide while pregnant in 1986. She survived, but the fetus was stillborn. She was arrested, charged with criminal abortion and held on a $5,000 bond. She pleaded not guilty for reasons of insanity.

In 1999, Regina McKnight, a 22-year-old Black woman from South Carolina, gave birth to a five-pound stillborn baby. McKnight was drug tested after the birth and arrested in the hospital for “homicide by child abuse” because she tested positive for cocaine. Although it was not conclusive that the cause of the stillbirth was due to her drug use, McKnight was sentenced to 20 years in prison after the jury deliberated for only 15 minutes.

Gabriela Flores, a 22-year-old woman from Mexico, managed her own abortion using pills in 2004 in South Carolina because she couldn’t afford a fourth child or the $700 in-clinic abortion on the $1.50 an hour she earned picking lettuce. Her neighbor found out about her abortion and called the cops, who initially wanted to charge Flores with homicide and seek the death penalty. Flores eventually pleaded guilty to an illegal abortion and spent a total of seven months in jail.

These are just a few of the stories included in Grace E. Howard’s new book, “ The Pregnancy Police: Conceiving Crime, Arresting Personhood ,” in which she analyzes 1,116 pregnancy-related arrests that happened between 1973 and 2022 in Tennessee, South Carolina and Alabama. Although the cases vary from self-managed abortion to substance use and miscarriage, each person was arrested for crimes against their own pregnancy.

“The criminal prosecution of