Grace Howard on Her New Book: The Pregnancy Police: Conceiving Crime, Arresting Personhood

Telling pregnant people what to do and enforcing pregnancy criminalization has been a decades-long threat.  Dr. Grace Howard sits down with us to discuss her new book, which “traces the long history of state attempts to regulate and control people who have the capacity for pregnancy--from the early twentieth century's white supremacist eugenics to the end of Roe and the ever-increasing criminalization of abortion across the United States.”

LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE

The Pregnancy Police: Conceiving Crime, Arresting Personhood
Dr. Grace Howard’s website
Dr. Grace Howard on Instagram
Decades of Stigmatization Fueled Growing Threat of Pregnancy Criminalization
Pregnancy Criminalization, Surveillance, and the Child Welfare System 
What Do We Know and What Should We Do About… Abortion?
Decades of Stigmatization Fueled Growing Threat of Pregnancy Criminalization

TAKE ACTION

Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back, a podcast on all things related to sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. [music intro]

Read More

Jennie: Hi rePROs. How are you doing? I'm your host, Jennie Wetter, and my pronouns are she/her. So, y'all, I am really excited for this week's episode. We're talking about a book that I read while I was on vacation, which feels like it was forever ago at this point. And I felt bad because I was reading on the beach and kept being like, Mom, oh my god, and like reading to her about some horrible thing that happened and sharing the horror of things I was learning. So sorry for bringing the vacation vibes down, Mom. Don't worry, I read more than a work book and I didn't read it that much. I just wanted to get a good jump start on it because I had the interview right when I got back. So, I wanted to have made a good dent in it while I was on vacation, which I did, and then finished it when I got home. But I did a lot of other fun reading while I was gone. I have been, I feel like I've been in a bit of a reading slump for a while. Like, I don't know that I've read bad books. One I was disappointed in. I think I had really high expectations, and it was not great, and I probably should have just DNF'd it, but I really wanted to love it, so I like stuck with it, and it did get better, and I got into the style more, but it just wasn't the delightful, cozy mystery that I had been thinking it would be. So, you may have seen the trailers for it— it may even be out now— of The Sheep Detectives, which looks delightful, and I'm still gonna watch the movie, but it's based on a book called Three Bags Full, and it was going all over socials. I think like during the pandemic, and people were talking about how delightful it was, and so I think I had different expectations to what it was, and maybe it just took me a while to settle into what it was that it got better. I don't know. I gave it like three stars, so I didn't hate it. I just was like, meh. So, I feel like I've just been like "meh" with books right now. But then I started reading this new book called Of Monsters and Mainframes that is billed as like a comedic horror space opera, and y'all, it has been delightful. I am about halfway through, and I have been really enjoying it and like having fun while I've been reading, so it has helped with the slump I was in a little bit, and so I'm very excited to finish it over the weekend. I'm recording this on Friday, so that is my one thing I want to get done this weekend is finishing that because it has been a delightful little romp.

I am also looking forward to later today going to a going-away party for a friend. I am very, very sad that this friend is moving to the West Coast. I'm very much gonna miss seeing her and hanging out, even if we don't get to do it as often as I would like. But I'm not gonna be able to do it anywhere near as often now that she's going to be in Washington. So very far away, lucky to still be working in the community, so I will still see her, and I'm sure she will have to come to DC every once in a while, and hopefully I'll be able to see her. But I'm very sad that she is leaving, but very excited for her new adventure and to still be working with her and for the party tonight. It'll be so nice to see her and a bunch of other people that I'm assuming are going to be there to send her off. So, things to look forward to. So yeah, that those are my big weekend plans. I haven't really- this week has been a little chaotic for me. I had a bit of a day on Wednesday. I often can be clumsy. I feel like I've had a pretty good stretch for the last while where I've not had like stupid injuries until Wednesday. I was leaving to go into the office because we're in office on that day, and I got distracted as I was walking out of the building and I wasn't paying attention, and I missed like a half step coming out of the door, and I fell and, like, landed on my knees, and like have a beautiful bruise on my knees, and I think I sprained the big toe on my left foot, and so I'm just like sore, and yeah, so like that was great, and then I got to work and was like unpacking my bag, and I did not bring my laptop. It was just like one of those days that I just needed a complete do-over. So anyway, I had turned promptly back around and went home and stayed home because I was like not going to go back into the office at that point, like that would just be silly. But it was just one of those days, and clearly the universe was telling me that I just needed to work from home. So, other than being a little sore and my big toe causing me some issues, I'm fine. But it was just like seriously, one of those days. Yeah, so hopefully that is my clumsiness for the foreseeable future, and we don't have any more accidents because I could go without for now, thanks.

I think maybe we'll leave it there and turn to this week's episode. I'm really excited for it. I read this book while I was on vacation. And we have been talking about having Grace Howard come on the podcast and talk about her book, and it has been one of those things that kept getting I couldn't find time to like sit and read it with like the report card and like all the things. Things were really busy, so I'm so excited that we were finally able to make it happen. The book is called The Pregnancy Police: Conceiving Crime, Arresting Personhood, and it is about pregnancy criminalization, and it is such a wonderful read, if horrifying read. I hope you all will check it out. We'll make sure to include bookshop links in the show notes. And with that, let's go to my interview with Grace.

Jennie: Hi, Grace. Thank you so much for being here.

Grace: Oh, it's a pleasure and an honor. I'm so happy to be here.

Jennie: I am so excited to have you here. I really, really loved your book as much as I sometimes wanted to throw it across the room or throw it into the ocean since I was reading it on the beach, but it was so good. But before we get there, again, I get all excited and sometimes jump right in. Would you like to introduce yourself before we start actually talking about the book?

Grace: Sure. My name is Grace Howard. I'm an Associate Professor of Justice Studies at San Jose State University. I do work on reproductive law, politics, policy, and pregnancy criminalization is my current area of focus.

Jennie: Okay, so your book, The Pregnancy Police: Conceiving Crime, Arresting Personhood, sorry. Like I said, I really loved it, but I think maybe one of the places to start is: what do we mean when you say pregnancy police?

Grace: It's meant to be a grabby title. And I'm thankful that we currently do not have like a formal pregnancy police force in the United States. I hope we never do, but these are in some cases informal, in some cases very formalized networks of people who surveil and police pregnant folks. The most active players here are healthcare providers, which is disturbing to me, I think is a major problem. In my study, 77% of pregnancy-related arrest cases originate with a healthcare provider making a report. But it's not just them, it's also social workers, regular law enforcement personnel, prosecutors and judges, of course. But it's also, it's, I mean, it's us, right? It's our friends, it's our family, it's our partners, it's our colleagues. So, really the vast kind of public has been brought in as members of this policing force. And in some ways, they are relying on us to surveil and police one another, turn one another in. I think, you know, for me, I think about so many of my friends who have been pregnant and have shared stories about unsolicited advice or people shaming them when they see them working out or running or drinking coffee and assuming it's caffeinated. And so, what if it is, right? Like, who are you, right? Who are you to tell me what I can drink and can't drink? So, there is, I think, this culturally accepted thing where we tell pregnant people what to do, right? And sometimes that goes all the way into the most literal deprivation of liberty being arrested and put in a cage because you are committing a crime against your developing pregnancy.

Jennie: Yeah, it's one of those things that you're like, yeah, there's no actual pregnancy police yet, but then the groups of people that you're talking about is- it's so many more people than you originally think about as you start thinking, talking about all of the ways that pregnant people have been caught up in this system of how they got in that position. And a little bit of like, how did we get here?

Grace: So, this has been a decades-long process. And I know if we're talking about kind of abortion legality, we often look at, right, this is not something that happened overnight. Dobbs didn't happen overnight, right? This was they play the long game really well, and that's true in pregnancy criminalization, also. I just had a new op-ed come out about this. And truth out that you know, the earliest arrest case in my study was 1986, right? Roe was still great law. A lot of us didn't start to pay attention or notice or care until we notice these arrests happening after Dobbs. But it has been happening for decades. They've had decades to build these networks, kind of refine practices to try things out in the law. The kind of post-Roe big wave of arrests happened, kind of coincided with the, you know, the quote unquote "War on Drugs." That, you know, there had been some concern before about maybe alcohol use during pregnancy or smoking cigarettes during pregnancy, but we started seeing lots of arrests being made of impoverished Black women who tested positive for crack cocaine. And so just as we were, you know, expanding police presence and funding and you know, mass incarceration is starting to happen in the United States, we also see that happening for the pregnant folks. South Carolina was a real leader in this. There were a few programs, one of which was founded by a racist nurse named Shirley Brown, where she was worried about her patients at the Medical University of South Carolina who were testing positive for crack cocaine. It's one of the only hospitals in the area that took Medicaid. It was located in an impoverished area. So, most of their patients, they had a very disproportionately Black and poor population that they were serving. She's not worried about, you know, rich white ladies who are using regular cocaine, right? Same drug. She is worried about poor Black women, primarily, right? And so, she developed a protocol with local law enforcement where they decided on a set of conditions that would trigger a drug test. And the idea, they often refer to this as "carrots and sticks," which is like what you do to lead a horse, right? So that's not, I don't like that. We're already animals here, right? But that, you know, we will try to coerce you into drug treatment by threatening you with incarceration.

Jennie: Yeah.

Grace: That's how it's supposed to work. Now, when you look at the depositions that the women who were arrested gave, a lot of them were never actually offered drug treatment anyway, right? Or the treatment that they were offered is just fully unworkable. Like it's, you know, far away from where they live and they don't have a car, for example, it's inpatient-only and they have children that they can't bring with them. What's gonna happen to their kids? So really, really not workable. I think it's important that we remember that start. Even though now we're seeing a lot of cases popping up where you have folks who miscarried and were accusing them of self-managing abortions. I mean, that's a problem, right? I think it really matters that this started using a population of people that is, I mean, if it's possible to be even more stigmatized than someone having an abortion. It's someone who's pregnant and using drugs, right? It's not like people become pregnant and then decide, like, now I will use drugs that try to hurt my baby. That's not what's happening here. Sometimes people become pregnant and sometimes those people are using drugs. That stigma, I think, really worked against us. And it certainly worked against them because it meant a lot of the more mainstream reproductive rights organizations felt very comfortable ignoring this as an issue, right? "This isn't our fight," this is a racism issue, this is a mass incarceration issue, it's a drug issue. We're already dealing with, you know, accusations of supporting baby killers. So we don't want to touch, you know, this pregnancy and drugs thing. It's, like, somehow even uglier. But what that meant, practically speaking, is that we have now had decades to build up the case law, right? Establishing fetuses as potential crime victims and establishing the people who gestate them as the offenders, right? Essentially writing fetal personhood into the criminal code, often with caveats for abortion, but that's when Roe was good law, right? You don't need to have those abortion caveats anymore. I think another angle that needs to be examined here also for looking at like the victims' rights movement, which, you know, like good feminists are among the people who started this movement, right? Paying attention to this major problem, which is that women and girls get beaten up and raped by men and that the police weren't paying attention. And in a lot of situations, it wasn't even considered a crime, right? If the person who did it was your husband, these crimes were not taken seriously. And so, you know, second wave feminists are pushing, like, hey, cops, take this seriously. If the way we're dealing with crimes is having cops intervene and people be arrested and incarcerated, why are you treating this like an exclusion or an exception? And it is an ugly reality that the time in a woman's life when she's most likely to be murdered is when she's pregnant, and that pregnancy is currently the leading cause of death of pregnant women in the United States. Like, that's a horror show. That shouldn't be possible, but that's where we are. And one thing, say, kind of the appropriation of feminist rhetoric and the work that the kind of feminist-led victims' rights movement, one thing that's happened is instead of dealing more substantively with the causes of intimate partner violence, being proactive about stopping intimate partner violence, to address this, you know, violence during pregnancy problem, a lot of states have adopted laws that define the fetus as a crime victim. And it's almost always framed with often very public and awful, right? These are like exceptionally horrible cases where, you know, someone cuts a pregnant woman open or you know, she's murdered. The Laci Peterson case is illustrative. I know I write about her in the book, the federal law that defines fetuses as crime victims was named after Laci and Connor, uh, right, who were, Laci was murdered on Christmas Eve. When she was like the most pregnant. And that's a horrible thing. In California, Scott Peterson could be charged with killing Laci and with killing the fetus, who they named Conner. And a lot of states have done this too. So, I think believe it's 38 states currently where the fetus is described as a potential crime victim. And it's almost always framed as third-party harm. But they've taken the precedent from those court cases or those laws, and they've also used that to punish the pregnant women themselves, right? So, this kind of double-sided coin of protection. On the one hand, we're ignoring that this is an intimate partner violence problem— it's almost always the partner doing these murders— and instead, we've elevated the legal status of the fetus. Even when these laws include explicit exemptions for the pregnant person, that has not stopped prosecutors from using those very laws. So even when we carve out exceptions, those exceptions aren't enough to stop it from happening.

Jennie: Yeah, some of the, I mean, throughout the book, like I said, I almost threw it several times because there were just some really frustrating stories in it, whether it was somebody had attempted suicide, somebody who was shot and then was charged. Like, there were just wild stories of these then being turned against the pregnant person.

Grace: Yeah, I mean it's hard. When I interviewed prosecutors for this book, which was a fascinating experience for me, and with the exception of one who really did behave like a caricature of an evil southern prosecutor, they all said basically, like, we don't want to punish these women. They need help and guidance, right? It's very “benevolent,” patriarchal.

Jennie: There was so much paternalistic...

Grace: It was so condescending, right?

Jennie: Oh, so much throughout.

Grace: Like, I'm sure you know exactly what she needs, huh buddy. But like, right, that's the way that they talked about it. And with some of them, I believe them, right? Like, one of the first people I interviewed, he was among the first prosecutors in South Carolina to start making these arrests. And he talked about getting an award at the state prosecutors meeting, whatever, I don't know what they called it, and people coming up and being like, "yeah, this is great. These women should burn in hell," and him being like, uh, what? And really being surprised by how hateful and punitive people are, but like, buddy, that's the law, right? Like, you don't get to control people's feelings with the law. Yeah. And you knew when you were- okay, I've been calling it something really stupid; I've been calling it "new boot goofin'" with the law, which is a reference to the show Reno 911. You don't know what I'm talking about, Google it. It's so stupid, but that you know, you have a law that doesn't explicitly say you can punish a pregnant person. But you take an existing law, right, and you “new boot goof” it. You interpret it in bizarre ways, sometimes even explicitly against what the legislature said when they were passing that law. And you can use it to do whatever you want. And if you can do it, you know that people down the line can do it too.

Jennie: Yeah.

Grace: Right? You know that your project that even if you did think it was some "benevolent," helpy-helper thing, that like this can totally be used just straight up to hurt people. And it will, and it has. So, that was pretty frustrating. But yeah, how can you say this is about helping pregnant women and not punishing them when, yeah, it means you're charging someone who tried to end their life with homicide, or that, you know, you're blaming someone who got shot in the abdomen and lost her pregnancy for it and charging her with it, not the shooter. That I mean, it's just- it's fully nonsensical. Like it doesn't, there's no logic, there beyond the logic of the fetus as a person, and you as the "gestator" have a legal obligation to be like a "perfect vessel."

Jennie: Yeah, I mean, I think that was like one of the things that really stood out was like really making it clear that the pregnant person and the fetus were two separate entities, and that the rights were not equal in these conversations. And some of the laws that were used also were wild.

Grace: Yeah, and the charges that can be brought, right? I mean, so that's one of the big challenges of doing this research that so many different kinds of charges can be used, right? So, it's not like you can just do a FOIA request and like give me all the pregnancy ones, because they're being charged with things like "unlawful abortion," "unlawful neglect," "reckless endangerment," "chemical endangerment," right? I mean, there's so many different charges that can apply, but I think, you know, in this circumstance and in the anti-abortion movement more broadly, the willingness to be creative with the law. I mean, "everybody's so creative," right? Like, shameless, we might say. It's frustrating in some ways to see how some parties in some situations get away with, right? The people who are supposed to be carrying out the law and enforcing the law and upholding the law and making the law, just doing whatever, right? Like breaking the rules, doing whatever and getting away with it. And I think that wouldn't be possible if we didn't have such a strong cultural position that says that you know you lose some of your humanity when you become pregnant, or that you're essentially public property when you become pregnant, and that the fetus has more rights than anyone.

Jennie: Where that really got me, and maybe it's because it's like towards the end of the book— like I said, so many of the stories stuck with me— but oh my god, the one where they arrested the pregnant woman because she was doing drugs, and then they were trying to get guardianship over the fetus so she couldn't get an abortion was wild. Yeah, like it kept getting like as the story kept unfolding, it was like new levels of crazy every sentence that, like, blew my mind.

Grace: Yeah, I mean that case was really bizarre, and I think you know, that case happened when Roe was still good law, and it did show sort of the legal conflict, you know, between, right? So, this was a case in Alabama. Alabama started charging people who tested positive for drugs during pregnancy with "chemical endangerment of a minor." That was a law meant to charge people who brought children into meth labs with crimes, which- we can talk about that too.

Jennie: That was also wild. Like your uterus is a meth lab.

Grace: Yeah, right, that it is a felony to have a child in an environment where drugs are being used or manufactured. So, like my uterus is an environment. Cool. Right? So, but that that could be true at the same time that abortion was legal in Alabama, right? And like obviously, like these are limited rights even then. Yeah. But yeah, that you can unintentionally, potentially endanger your pregnancy, and that's a felony. You can intentionally terminate a pregnancy, and that's legal. And that's a conflict that the prosecutors were aware of. Some of them, you know, did express anti-abortion views. And the one in this case, I interviewed that prosecutor, and he certainly expressed anti-abortion views. And so, yeah, this woman was on probation, and so she was being drug tested regularly, and she became pregnant while she was on probation and tested positive for pregnancy and drugs. But she had already been planning on having an abortion, right? It takes time to get that money together. She was gonna have to drive a few hours away to the nearest clinic, but she had been getting that together when she was arrested. And it should be noted that, like, incarcerated people have a right to abortion. Carolyn Sufrin does some really great work on this. It's hard to access abortion care when you're incarcerated, but incarcerated people are the only people in the United States with a right to health care. And abortion is health care, right? So she was still fighting for that. She had attorneys, ACLU got involved, helping her to access the abortion care that she had already been planning. And that prosecutor, who was, you know, big on this "chemical endangerment" stuff and an anti-abortion guy, threatened to take custody of the fetus while it was still inside of her to prevent her from having an abortion. He appointed an attorney to represent that fetus. He also, super weirdly, appointed an attorney to represent her in the child custody case. Hello, conflict of interest. Would you trust an attorney that a prosecutor appoints for you to represent your interests? Right? And the attorney that was appointed for her is an anti-abortion guy too, right? So, she was really pressured into not having an abortion. They told her if she did have an abortion, they would get the fetus from the abortion clinic and test it and use it as evidence against her in her chemical endangerment case. They said, if you don't have the abortion, then we won't charge you with chemical endangerment. And so, like, a lot of kind of legal back and forth. Like I said, the ACLU got involved and then suddenly she changes her mind and says she's going to give birth to this baby. Which, like, you have a right to change your mind. But when you have that kind of pressure, that kind of coercion, it's, I mean, it's really, really sketchy.

Jennie: Yeah.

Grace: And we know what happened to her because that prosecutor told me proudly, and he considered this a real win, right? That she spent the rest of that pregnancy in jail, which, like, I can't imagine a worse place to be pregnant. She gave birth to her baby. She was released from jail. She started using drugs again because of course she did.

Jennie: Yeah.

Grace: People use drugs when they're traumatized. This seems like a traumatizing experience to me. I mean, she was already struggling, right? And so, they took her baby away from her and they put her in prison, right? Violated her probation. He considered that a win. We know even if the only one in this equation that you care about is that baby, being separated from your bio mom is not good for that baby. Lifelong trauma with infant separation. Even if your mom is using drugs, using drugs doesn't mean you're an unfit parent. Those are separate, those are separate questions. And so, even if the only one you care about is the baby, I wouldn't consider that that scenario a win.

Jennie: No, I mean that whole story, I like I said, it was, it really just jumped out at me. There were so many that really jumped out, and like I said, almost through the book multiple times, as frustrating as some of them were. It was just mind-boggling. And I think the other one that really stood out, we were talking about this. I was reading this, we were sitting at a table near the beach, and I was with my mom, and you were talking about some of the details of the Buck v. Bell case, and I knew the outlines of it. It's not one I had dug into the full details of, and as we were as I was reading it, I kept being like, Mom, and like reading her sentences as as we were going. So, one, sorry, mom, for bringing such a bummer on our vacation, but it was infuriating.

Grace: Yeah, I think about the Buck v. Bell case a lot. And I mean what brought me to that case, it was an interesting experience. So, like I grew up in Virginia, which is where the Buck v. Bell case happened, right? That's where it came out of. And my parents were city people, but they moved to a town called Winchester, Virginia, when I was a little baby, so that they could afford to have a house with a backyard, right? They had lived near DC and it's expensive there. So, they moved to Winchester and we didn't have a lot of money, and there was always this kind of distinction that, like, we might be poor and white, but we're not "poor white trash," which like that's interesting to unpack, yeah, right? And you'd see like the country people would come into the, you know, the locally biggest city, tiny ass Winchester, right? To go shopping at the Circuit City on the weekend or whatever, right? But then I moved North for my PhD program, right? I was going to school at Rutgers and it is a state school, but PhD programs do tend to have, you know, I mean, people with money tend to go, right? I got a full ride to go. It's the only way it was possible for me to go. And there was just this really interesting thing of being a Virginian in the North amongst people who- most of them had always had money. There was definitely this sense of like, “oh, you little backward Southern thing,” which is like, okay. And yeah, there were a lot of Confederate flags in my town. That's a reality. And did you know there's more active Klan in New Jersey than there is in Virginia? So, there was just this really, I noticed it kind of in my own experience, and it was in a Black feminist theory class, interestingly enough, where I started doing some work on critical whiteness and started learning about the history of, you know, quote-unquote "white trash" in a racial hierarchy, it always benefits the people on top to create more hierarchy. And that meant carving out the kind of degraded, quote-unquote, "lowest class white people," that they are evidence of "white degradation," and we can't be having that. If we are making an argument that we are the supreme race, then what does it mean that we have, you know, people jaundiced and tired from hookworm because they can't afford shoes, right? And what does it mean that there are people who still don't have access to running water, electricity plants? And so, they needed to get rid of those people, and that was a really big part of the eugenic plan, the early US eugenic movement. I know a lot of us when we think eugenics, we think Nazi Germany, but y'all, they learned it from watching us. What we did to enslaved people, what we did to Indigenous people, and then what we started doing to poor white folks and people of color and immigrants. So, you know, at this time, early 1920s and ‘30s, we were totally freaking out about immigration. We were freaking out about a "declining white birth rate." Does that sound familiar?

Jennie: Oh no, I haven't heard anything about that recently.

Grace: Moms.gov — oh no, “underbabied!"

Jennie: Being "underbabied."

Grace: Oh my god, as one of the “underbabied,” I object. But we were also really, you know, this wasn't that long after the emancipation of enslaved people. And so, freaking out about, you know, now that we have Black people who we don't own, suddenly we don't like it when they reproduce, right? We liked it when we owned their reproduction, but not anymore. We were really worried about “race mixing.” And it was in that context that the eugenics movement got really big in the United States. So, Carrie Buck had a mom named Emma. Records, oldie time records are tough, especially if you're poor. So, it's hard to know exactly what happened here. But Emma had three children and was not married, and there were multiple fathers. And Emma was placed in an institution against her will. The Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded is what it was called, near Charlottesville, Virginia. Carrie was placed in foster care with ironically the Dobbs family.

Jennie: I did note that.

Grace: Oh no. And while she was in their care, she was raped by a member of the family. And when she started to show is when they put her away, too, right? Because that would bring shame upon the family. It's her fault, right? An unmarried ward. We can't be having that. She's just like her mother. The idea. So, she's also institutionalized. She has the baby there. She names the baby Vivian. The baby is taken from her, and she never sees her again. And a social worker visited that baby and admitted, like, I know the family's history, and so my assessment could be totally biased here. And yeah, it's a baby, so I don't know what kind of assessment I'm able to do about this baby's mental capacity. But based on my assessment, I think this baby doesn't seem quite normal. And that means now we have three generations of "eugenically unfit" women in this family. Three, they were kind of obsessed with threes, the three generations thing. And part of this is because they were concerned about dominant and recessive traits. So that you could seem normal, but be carrying a recessive kind of unfit gene, right? And the idea is that, like by three generations it should, it should show. I don't know if you remember your like pundit squares from middle school, your pea plant colors. But yeah, right, that you can have a plant with white flowers produce plants with pink flowers, right? And so, they wanted to make sure we gotta get all those “pink flowers,” man. Can't let any of those pink flowers out here breeding. And that the idea was actually considered progressive at the time. As they say, in the court case, instead of incarcerating these people or executing them for their degeneracy or letting them starve in the streets, we can "breed our way to a utopia by cutting off these undesirable branches." And that's what they did to Carrie and her sister, Doris, too. And we did this to thousands and thousands of people. As a Virginian now living in California, I do feel like I should say California was one of the biggest players here. So, I know that we like to, in the West and especially in the Northeast, we like to pretend like all the bad is in the South. But I'm sorry to break it to you. It is everywhere. And yeah, California did it harder than anyone. One of the more disturbing things about... I mean, there are so many disturbing things about Buck v. Bell, but one of them is that this case was never overturned.

Jennie: I kept saying that as I was talking to my mom. I was like, but this is still law. Like, this has not been struck down.

Grace: Mm-hmm. They cited Buck v. Bell in Roe v. Wade. Which, like, nobody likes Roe v. Wade. But I mean, one of the things that they say in Roe v. Wade is establishing that the government does have an interest in pregnancy. They do. Now, your right to abortion, you know, you can have that for the first trimester for sure, and a little bit in second trimester and third trimester, take it away if you want, right? But like, we are saying that the government is interested in this. And yeah, that has never been overturned. The last state to get rid of its explicit eugenic sterilization law was South Carolina. No. North Carolina, yes. In 2003.

Jennie: Yeah, I was shocked.

Grace: That's too recent.

Jennie: Yeah.

Grace: I was in high school and that's unexpected. I remember being very shocked when I read the year. Yeah, terrible, right? But because it hasn't been overturned, like it is constitutional. A state could totally pass another one of those laws. And even without the explicit eugenic laws, we have seen other efforts. It's still true that if you have a disability and you're under a guardianship, that, you know, your reproductive decisions are not your own. I mean, you might think of Britney Spears and her IUD, right? But like, people get sterilized against their will because their guardians want them to. And the logic here, you know, sometimes it's, oh, well, we don't want to, you know, this disabled woman has a period, and we don't, that's messy and we don't want to deal with it. And some of it, even darker, is well, you're in an institution and we know you're being raped here, and we don't want to have to deal with the reality of pregnancy. Which, like, again, yikes! That seems- what? That's- are we focusing on the wrong problem? It's really, really disturbing. And we have seen, even though it started this focus on poor white folks, that it grew, and it always does. Always. Just like we started focusing pregnancy criminalization on drug users, it does not stay there. And that this, you know, we ended up sterilizing a lot of poor Black women and girls in the South. Fanny Lou Hamer coined the term "Mississippi appendectomy," because they would tell these girls and their families, you know, you need your appendix out, lie to them, and instead do a hysterectomy while they were in there. And often not even tell them about it. Or there have been proposals that you have to get sterilized if you want to continue receiving welfare benefits, or you have to prove that you're not fertile, or if you have additional children, we will give you no assistance with these children. And it's really sending a message, I think it's still so relevant today. Whose reproduction is deemed worthy? Whose reproduction is deemed threatening? And whose are we trying to encourage, and whose are we trying to stop from happening? I think in some cases we really understand certain people's reproduction as a like threat to domestic security. Which, wow, seems like your reproduction might be pretty powerful, you know.

Jennie: Because I mean, let's be clear, this whole pronatalist movement is not about more babies, it's about more white babies.

Grace: If we were really, really worried about population decline, we wouldn't be trying so hard to kick immigrants out of the United States right now. I mean, hello. And we wouldn't be so pissy about quote-unquote "anchor babies," right? Like, it is so transparently not about that. Yeah, that this is, you know, when Elon Musk talks about wanting to have legions of children, he wants to have white boys. He thinks that people like him, right? I think like what, Jeffrey Epstein's baby factory, right? I know how deep into the conspiracy theory shit we're going, but like, no, this dude was interested in eugenics, and he thought that his own genes were really something special, and he wanted to have as many offspring as possible. Not because he's interested in parenting those offspring, but because, you know, this idea of "Great Replacement" Theory that white people are being replaced, and that that's bad. And so, white people need to be reproducing as much as possible to fight it. And, you know, the best white people, you know, like Jeffrey Epstein and Elon Musk.

Jennie: Oh no! Great. Oh boy.

Grace: Yeah.

Jennie: Okay, I feel like there are so many more things we should talk, could talk about, but I will just say people should absolutely read the book. It is so good, but maybe let's focus a little bit on: what we need to change right now? It feels like there are so many ways where the pregnancy police show up and then in so many different places. Like, what are some of the things that we need to be thinking about right now to change to get rid of that?

Grace: So, that means that there are so many places where we can intervene and interject and try to stop this from happening. So, there's a place for everyone in this fight, and I think that everyone should be invested in this fight. If you think that people with the capacity for pregnancy deserve to be considered full human beings, if you think that we deserve medical privacy, if you think we deserve support and not punishment, you should get in this fight. If you are a healthcare provider, stop drug-testing your pregnant patients. I know you're probably told to do it, and I know that your hospital lawyers are probably telling you that you have to report it. That's only true in a couple of states, right? For the vast majority of people, it is not the law that you have to report a positive drug test as child abuse as a mandated reporter. So, consider not drug testing your patients and be really cautious about what you choose to write down on a chart. I know they say like the change begins within you. So, I know it's corny, but I mean it's sort of true. Like, I think a lot of us do carry stigma about you know what pregnant people should and shouldn't be doing and what a good mom does and doesn't do, and a lot of that is kind of bullshitty. So, I want to encourage you to stop being so judgmental. Like, work on that within your own feelings, and if that translates into like, don't gossip about people, maybe don't call the cops on someone, right? Especially if you know that that call is not likely to result in help, right? You probably think you're helping. That call is not likely to result in help at all. Support is better than punishment financially, health-wise; I would suggest morally, but that's just me. We need people pushing back publicly. A lot of this stuff is happening outside of the law, technically, right? So, if a prosecutor in your jurisdiction is new boot goofing with the law, vote them out. These are elected positions almost always, right? And a lot of the time they're running with no opposition. So, maybe you need to run a new prosecutor where you are. Sometimes outrage is enough to kill these charges. So, generate outrage. If you're good at social media, if you like to protest, generate outrage. Sometimes that's enough to free a person. We also need attorneys to be engaged in this work. I know a lot of people are working with public defenders who have huge caseloads and really no support at all. So, they could use our support. There are a few groups out there who are doing wonderful legal advocacy work. If/When/How is one of them. Pregnancy Justice is another. If you have money, I'm sure they could use your support. And I'll just say, it does seem really overwhelming. It seems like a lot of things are getting worse. We're potentially looking at, you know, it not being kind of FDA approved to mail abortion pills through the mail. So, we are kind of anticipating an increase in the criminalization of abortion. Protect one another, help one another. Remember that if you need follow-up care after taking abortion pills, that you do not have to tell them you took pills, that the follow-up care is exactly the same. Be careful who you talk to. That shouldn't have to be advice that I'm giving you, but it is. Be careful about what you choose to communicate with your healthcare provider. Do get medical help if you need medical help, but you don't have to tell them you took pills. And depending on the legality and who you're talking to, maybe you shouldn't, right? So just to be really cautious about those kinds of things. Unfortunately, that's the world we're living in. One thing that gives me hope to think about, because I know it's all very overwhelming. Yes. We made all this up, right? Like, the law is pretend. Sometimes it's really, really pretend, right? And we made all of these institutions up, and that means we can make them again. There is nothing inevitable or necessary about these punitive, nonsensical, mean institutions. And that does mean that we can make them again, and we can make something better. And I think that we all have an obligation to work towards that goal, and I think we can do it.

Jennie: That's such a good place to end. I will just flag, if y'all are interested in this conversation and pregnancy criminalization one, absolutely read Grace's book. It was so good. We'll make sure to include the bookshop link in the show notes. But also, if you want to learn how this relates to the family policing system, which Grace talks about in her book, we do have a great interview that we will also include in the show notes with Lourdes at Pregnancy Justice and Dorothy Roberts with her talking about her book Torn Apart. So, it's all interrelated and part of the same conversation. So, it's important to think about it as a whole. Okay, Grace, thank you so much for being here.

Grace: Well, my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Jennie: Okay, y'all. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Grace. Like I said, I really loved this book. It was horrifying and made me angry, and I almost threw it multiple times. But it was such a good read. Highly recommend it. And with that, I will see everybody next week. If you have any questions, comments, or topics you would like us to cover, always feel free to shoot me an email. You can reach me at jennie@reprosfightback.com, or you can find us on social media. We're at rePROs Fight Back on Facebook and Twitter, or @reprosfb on Instagram. If you love our podcast and want to make sure more people find it, take the time to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Or if you want to make sure to support the podcast, you can also donate on our website at reprosfightback.com. Thanks all.