Abortion Bans Criminalize People — and Not Just Those Who Are Pregnant

On March 20, 2025, emergency responders found Selena Maria Chandler-Scott bleeding uncontrollably after miscarrying at 19 weeks in her Tifton, Georgia, home. Chandler-Scott was immediately taken to the hospital for further treatment. The next day, while still recovering in the hospital, she was charged for her own miscarriage under the state’s 2019 “fetal personhood” law. She faced up to 13 years in prison.

The charges drew widespread condemnation, enough that they were eventually dropped. But Chandler-Scott’s traumatic ordeal reveals the ultimate endpoint of abortion bans — criminalizing pregnant people, whether they have an abortion or not.

Cases like Chandler-Scott’s are sadly nothing new. For years, even as they have pursued total abortion bans, abortion opponents have largely insisted that they never intended and do not want pregnant people who seek abortions to be prosecuted. They have consistently made this deceptive promise as numerous states, including Alabama, Indiana and Mississippi prosecuted people — mostly women of color — for their pregnancy outcomes, including miscarriage, for decades before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

In 2021, for example, a Nebraska teenager was sentenced to 90 days in prison after self-managing an abortion after the state’s 20-week limit. Her mother was sentenced to two years in prison for helping her daughter obtain abortion medication online.

But in the wake of Roe’s demise, pregnancy outcomes — and even actions taken to help pregnant people — have faced escalating criminalization. According to Pregnancy Justice, a legal organization that defends pregnant people who face criminalization, more than 200 pregnant people have faced criminal charges from the fall of Roe in June 2022 to the end of 2024.

A disturbing example is that of Brittany Watts, a 33-year-old Ohio woman who went to the hospital after her water broke at 22 weeks, far too early to safely deliver her baby. Doctors were worried about treating her because of the state’s abortion ban (which has since been struck down); Watts ultimately left the hospital and miscarried in the toilet of her home bathroom. Watts was then charged with “abuse of a corpse” for flushing the miscarried fetal remains in her own toilet.

Criminalization isn’t just limited to pregnant people, either. Last month, Texas authorities arrested midwife Maria Margarita Rojas at gunpoint on charges of providing illegal abortions. Led by the state’s extremist anti-abortion Attorney General Ken Paxton, Rojas has been charged with a second-degree felony and faces up to 20 years in prison because of the state’s draconian total abortion ban. Texas has also sued a New York-based doctor for providing medication abortion to Texans in spite of the state’s abortion ban; Louisiana has filed criminal charges against the same doctor. While it’s unlikely that New York will allow the doctor to be extradited to face charges, the suit reveals how serious some states are about criminalizing every avenue to miscarriage and abortion care.

Under abortion bans, the life of the pregnant person is a secondary concern. Doctors are afraid of being prosecuted for treating a potentially life-threatening health issue; someone facing a miscarriage is afraid of being prosecuted for flushing the toilet; and a teenager and her mother were imprisoned because she didn’t know where else to turn for an abortion in her state.

This isn’t an accident, but an intentional byproduct of overturning Roe and ending the constitutional right to an abortion. Ending Roe was meant to ripple far beyond abortion — it was meant to erode the personhood of pregnant people, to eradicate their full-fledged autonomy and ability to determine the course of their own lives. When you reduce someone to less than a person in the eyes of the state, criminalization is never far behind.

Chandler-Scott is mercifully no longer facing criminal charges for her miscarriage, but it is simply a matter of time before someone else faces prison time for miscarrying or self-managing an abortion. And that’s because criminalization has always been at the heart of policing reproductive choices. Abortion opponents have always known that, even when they have tried to sanitize their own positions by claiming they don’t want abortion patients to be criminalized. Now that Roe is gone and the era of mass criminalization of pregnancy outcomes is here, that lie looks even more despicable.

When Donald Trump admitted that he believed pregnant people deserved “some form of punishment” for seeking abortions on the campaign trail in 2016, he was roundly criticized by abortion opponents to the point that he recanted. Turns out, for once, he was telling the truth.