Are miscarriages illegal?

Of course it is not illegal to have a miscarriage. But, increasingly, women like Selena Chandler-Scott who miscarry have been harassed, suspected of, and sometimes charged with crimes like “abuse of a corpse,” “concealing a dead body,” or “abandoning a dead body.” (As I say in Selena’s story, there are not, yet, any laws concerning how women must dispose of miscarriages, although there are regulations for how medical facilities must do so.) One woman, whose story I stitch for Vol. 2, spent 147 days in prison before such charges were dismissed. In this square, I wanted to convey my anger at how Selena was humiliated with a published mugshot during this process. The image of the mugshot fortuitously evokes the human profile that appears on shooting targets; women are indeed being targeted and, unsurprisingly, in most of the cases I know of, the women are Black. The treatment of women like Selena stems from and contributes to a climate of distrust and suspicion concerning women and pregnancy. Organizations like Pregnancy Justice refer to this climate as the “criminalization of pregnancy.” Ultimately, the harassment of these women also stokes arguments for “fetal personhood” laws, which is what many anti-abortion activists have as their goal; the cases encourage people to think of miscarried fetuses as “dead persons.”