Read About All of Our Legal Advocacy, Public Education, and Organizing Work
How Fetal Protection Laws Fail to Protect (And Even Hurt) Pregnant People
When laws are passed to "protect fetuses," what does that mean for pregnant people?
Join Pregnancy Justice for a panel discussion featuring leaders in social work, law, medicine, and birth justice about the direct impact of fetal protection laws on pregnant people.
Experts Address the Rights of Pregnant Patients to Informed Consent, Bodily Integrity, and Medical Decision Making
What happens when a pregnant patient exercises their right to medical decision making? Is there any justification to override a pregnant patient’s consent? Join Pregnancy Justice for a discussion featuring leaders in bioethics, medicine, law and birth justice about pregnant patients' rights to informed consent, bodily integrity, and medical decision making and the trauma that forced medical interventions can inflict on pregnant people.
Pregnancy Justice Executive Director Lynn M Paltrow and Consulting Policy Counsel Deborah Small present at the Meharry Medical College: Henry W. Foster OBGYN Interest Group Reproductive Justice Conference.
www.NationalAdvocatesforPregantWomen.
“In Defense of Roe” is a film documenting the groundbreaking 1989 conference that brought together leaders of the growing women of color reproductive rights movement with grassroots and progressive white women.
The conference was called in part as a response to the fact that mainstream groups who were organizing a march on Washington had not included women of color leaders in the planning or organizing of the march.
Adora Perez was charged with murder in 2018 after she delivered a stillborn baby at Adventist Hospital in Hanford, California. District Attorney Keith Fagundes claimed, without scientific basis, that the stillbirth was caused by methamphetamine use. Penal Code Section 187 punishes the “unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought.
Brittney Poolaw, a 20-year-old Oklahoma woman, was convicted of manslaughter in the first degree for experiencing a miscarriage at 17 weeks. She was sentenced to 4 years in state prison. Contrary to all medical science, the prosecutor blamed the miscarriage on Brittney’s alleged use of controlled substances.
On Tuesday, October 5, Brittney Poolaw, a 20-year-old Oklahoma woman, was convicted of manslaughter in the first degree for experiencing a miscarriage at 17 weeks and sentenced to 4 years in state prison.
Last year, Ms. Poolaw experienced a miscarriage and went to Comanche County Hospital for medical help.
Dear Friends and Allies,
I am guessing that the disastrous developments happening in Texas and the Supreme Court have already caught your attention. But just in case: a few weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court did not stop a plainly unconstitutional six-week abortion ban, Texas’s SB8, from going into effect.
On September 20, 2021, Pregnancy Justice, with co-counsel David Goldberg, partner at Donahue, Goldberg, and Littleton, filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in support of Respondents’ challenge to Mississippi’s law banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
In 2013, the Journal of Public Health Law and Policy published Pregnancy Justice (“Pregnancy Justice”) peer-reviewed study documenting arrests, detentions, and equivalent deprivations of physical liberty of women between 1973 and 2005 in which being pregnant was a necessary element of the crime or a “but for” reason for the coercive or punitive action taken.
