Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Texas has been among the states where prosecutors have been most aggressive in charging people for pregnancy-related crimes, according to a new study.
A report released this week by advocacy group Pregnancy Justice found that prosecutors in the Lone Star State brought nine pregnancy-related criminal charges against people between June 2022 and June 2024, tying it with Mississippi for having the fourth-largest number of cases.
Nationwide, researchers tallied a total of 412 faced pregnancy-related criminal cases during the study period, ranging from child neglect and substance abuse charges to those related to lost pregnancies and violations of abortion laws.
Alabama had the most at 192, while Oklahoma and South Carolina followed with 112 and 62, respectively. Most of the 16 states where prosecutions occurred, including Texas, have so-called fetal personhood laws, according to the report.
In a statement, Pregnancy Justice President Lourdes A. Rivera said the data highlights a disturbing trend that’s emerged as right-wing lawmakers and courts give fetuses the legal rights of a person.
“This data shows how giving separate legal rights to fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses has real and dangerous consequences for pregnant people,” Rivera said. “Every one of these 412 cases represents a woman who faced investigation, arrest, and trauma — often after seeking health care. Instead of investing in maternal and reproductive health, prosecutors are weaponizing the law against pregnant people, especially in states already facing maternal mortality and infant health crises.”
Pregnancy Justice also cautioned that its numbers probably skew low because there’s no centralized nationwide database to view arrest or court records. Further, sometimes the charges are brought under statutes that may not specifically mention pregnancy or abortion.
Of the study’s 412 cases, 31 targeted women who lost their pregnancies. Those prosecutions amount to “treating miscarriage and stillbirth as suspicious events rather than personal, medical experiences,” Pregnancy Justice officials said of the findings.
Nine of the total cases were abortion-related and could include charges brought against an individual for infractions as minor as looking up abortion information online or ordering safe abortion medication that’s legal in another state, according to the report.
While supporters of pregnancy-related criminal charges defend their use as an effort to protect the unborn, prosecutors in only a small fraction of cases in the study tried to prove a fetus suffered actual harm, the authors report.
“Prosecutors overwhelmingly charged pregnant people under statutes that allow them to obtain convictions without proving the pregnant person actually harmed the fetus or infant,” the report states. “In 378 of the 412 charges, proof of harm was not required.”
Pregnancy Justice also found that more than three-quarters of defendants in the cases it examined were low-income individuals. Additionally, the majority of the cases involved information obtained in medical settings or interactions with the child-welfare system.
“These data suggest the criminal legal system works closely with the healthcare system and family policing system to surveil and punish pregnant people,” the study said.
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