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1 results

  • 8 - The Pregnancy Penalty: When the State Gets It Wrong

  • Michele Goodwin
  • Book:
    Policing the Womb
    Published online:
    07 February 2020
    Print publication:
    12 March 2020, pp 129-148

  • Summary

    This chapter highlights how legislators, prosecutors, and judges sympathetic to a tough-on-crime or “using the stick” approach to pregnant women and their bodies miscalculate the human and financial costs of their decision-making. Their approaches do not improve health outcomes for women or their children. Rather, legislators, prosecutors, and judges are misguided to believe that harsh criminal punishments and invasive civil sanctions reduce the incidents of miscarriage, stillbirth, low birth weight, genetic abnormalities, childhood asthma, obesity, diabetes, and more. Yet, these conditions are not improved, let alone cured, through criminal punishment or civil confinement of pregnant women.