This is our new #prolife dystopia: A woman was arrested for "chemical endangerment" for using drugs while pregnant. The problem: She wasn't pregnant. So officers released her, but told her if she gets pregnant IN THE NEXT FEW MONTHS she'll be re-arrested.
reuters.com/legal/governme…
There are all kinds of legal things adults do that potentially put fetuses at risk of harm or death. Fetal personhood laws put pregnant women in a different category of person, vulnerable to prosecution for doing totally normal things. What if a woman falls skiing? Drinks coffee?
Of course law enforcement go for the most vulnerable and least sympathetic women first. No one is like, "using drugs while pregnant is great." But addiction is a disease. Many rehab centers won't take pregnant women. Locking pregnant women up puts them at greater risk.
And the underlying logic of these laws can come for any of us. If a fertilized egg is a person, what if a woman of childbearing age drinks before she know she's pregnant? Seems pretty negligent! What a pregnant woman intentionally eats lunch meat, a rare steak, an oyster?
Are these misogynist monsters going to go after a woman who miscarries after eating an oyster? I dunno, probably not? But right now they're going after a doctor for performing a perfectly legal abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim, because they're mad she talked about it.
There is a concerted effort in the anti-abortion movement to shut down the kind of horror stories we're hearing from women miscarrying and being denied adequate medical treatment. Is it beyond imagination that women who speak out may find themselves on the wrong end of the law?
Maybe I'm paranoid. But I can tell you that anti-abortion law makers, activists, & law enforcement officers have done some incredibly shocking stuff. "Overreach" doesn't begin to describe it. So I'm not confident that pregnant women who make even mildly imperfect choices are safe
Pregnancy should not put women in a more vulnerable legal category. And yet, since 1973, there have been "more than 1,300 arrests and detentions that wouldn’t have happened if the person weren’t pregnant or suspected to be," according to Pregnancy Justice. reuters.com/legal/governme…
What if a pregnant woman has cancer, lives in a state where abortion is not an option, and opts for chemotherapy? Is she at risk for prosecution? What about the doctor who treats her? This is not a hypothetical -- thousands of pregnant women are diagnosed with cancer.
This isn't the first of these cases. It won't be the last:

"in 2019, an Alabama grand jury indicted a woman who lost her unborn baby when she was shot, after declining to charge the shooter because it found she had fired in self-defense."
These cases existed before Roe was overturned. But Roe was at least a barrier to these kinds of prosecutions, if a highly imperfect one. Now, the anti-abortion movement is emboldened, and all bets are off.
I've fleshed this all out in a newsletter that will go out tomorrow AM. The women these laws put at particular risk: domestic violence victims, women with cancer, women with addiction disorders, and women who simply speak out about miscarrying.
jill.substack.com
This case is a troubling preview of what can happen when the state decides it belongs in our collective uteruses, and when a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus is given more rights than the human being they reside in.
jill.substack.com/p/welcome-to-t…

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More from @JillFilipovic

Dec 1
Apropos of absolutely nothing, I would really really love editors to stop inserting the phrase "by some." I get that it's an attempt to clarify that not *everyone* is doing something, but it's just awkward and non-specific. Here's on example from a recent Times op/ed:
I obviously don't know for sure, but I would bet $100 that the writer is not the one who added the "by some." Maybe just trust that the reader is smart enough to understand that when she says her decision was "met by alarm," she means generally but not universally?
Here's another. In this case, who is the "some"? Homeless advocacy groups? Researchers?
Read 4 tweets
Nov 30
I wrote about the American epidemic of isolation and loneliness, and how a society of isolated people is a radically unhealthy society, as well as a more volatile, extreme, and violent society.
jill.substack.com/p/the-loneline…
Americans spend more time alone than ever. We spend less and less time with friends. These trends were exacerbated during the pandemic, but they pre-dated it. And no, online interactions, while they can be great, are not the same as in-person ones.
It's especially worrying that teenagers are spending so much more time alone. Less socializing means less learning how to deal with interpersonal conflict and disagreement, and less learning how to cultivate deep connections and form new ones. It means fewer well-adjusted adults.
Read 14 tweets
Nov 29
Watching the tweets go from extremely dumb to pretty terrible to holy shit that's sociopathic Image
A Zero Covid policy that locks people in their houses without enough to eat, hyper-surveils them, warehouses citizens into over-crowded quarantine centers with the lights on 24/7, and is enforced by an authoritarian state that refuses more effective vaccines is bad, guys.
At the point where you're so obsessed with decreasing the Covid spread that you'll justify the worst excesses of authoritarian governments -- including excess that *kill people* and are then covered up -- you've really lost the plot.
Read 4 tweets
Nov 16
Kind of jarring that Trump announced his candidacy yesterday and not a single news story I've read on it mentions the fact that he's been accused of sexual assault or harassment by at least 25 women, and has admitted, on tape, to assaulting women. Just... a total non-issue.
I get it, this is no longer news, but it is stunning how quickly we went from expecting the public be shocked by serial sexual assailants running for office to just... expecting that GOP voters are fine with rapists, wife beaters, and misogynists stripping women of our rights.
The Republican frontrunner for president was accused of sexual assault or harassment by 25+ women. His ex wife said he raped her. He was caught on tape bragging about sexual assault. And he appointed three Supreme Court justices who stripped abortion rights from American women.
Read 5 tweets
Nov 1
There were more than 10,000 fewer abortions since Dobbs than in the same period last year. Here's what that number can't tell us:

jill.substack.com/p/fewer-women-…
-The hours lost with the children a woman already had.
-The number of women stuck in abusive relationships, and the children abused.
-The children who never reach their full potential because the state forced their mothers to go through with additional pregnancies.
-The children neglected and abused because they were forced into adults who are not capable of caring for them, or do not want to care for them.
-The relationships never forged, partners never met.
-The intellectual pursuits never pursued, jobs never worked, money never saved.
Read 10 tweets
Nov 1
Important piece from @michelleinbklyn on a dynamic that is animating New York's race for governor, too: Even many liberal voters find the status quo on homelessness and crime (or perceptions of crime, partly fueled by homelessness) to be untenable.
nytimes.com/2022/10/31/opi…
Too much Democratic messaging -- and mostly from a lot from progressive writers / "thought leaders" / people who get conflated with the Democratic Party -- has been "there is no problem." The result is this: People don't trust Democrats to solve what is in fact a problem.
This is also one of those issues that, on the left, people discuss with their friends and loved ones, but that it's become pretty impossible to talk about publicly and openly, because there is such intense blowback - creating an opinion media echo chamber that only fuels distrust
Read 11 tweets

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