Book contents
- Policing the Womb
- Policing the Womb
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Pregnancy and State Power
- 3 Creeping Criminalization of Pregnancy across the United States
- 4 Abortion Law
- 5 Changing Roles of Doctors and Nurses: Hospital Snitches and Police Informants
- 6 Revisiting the Fiduciary Relationship
- 7 Creating Criminals: Race, Stereotypes, and Collateral Damage
- 8 The Pregnancy Penalty: When the State Gets It Wrong
- 9 Policing Beyond the Border
- 10 Lessons for Law and Society: A Reproductive Justice New Deal or Bill of Rights
- 11 Conclusion
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
8 - The Pregnancy Penalty: When the State Gets It Wrong
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 February 2020
- Policing the Womb
- Policing the Womb
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Pregnancy and State Power
- 3 Creeping Criminalization of Pregnancy across the United States
- 4 Abortion Law
- 5 Changing Roles of Doctors and Nurses: Hospital Snitches and Police Informants
- 6 Revisiting the Fiduciary Relationship
- 7 Creating Criminals: Race, Stereotypes, and Collateral Damage
- 8 The Pregnancy Penalty: When the State Gets It Wrong
- 9 Policing Beyond the Border
- 10 Lessons for Law and Society: A Reproductive Justice New Deal or Bill of Rights
- 11 Conclusion
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter highlights how legislators, prosecutors, and judges sympathetic to a tough-on-crime or “using the stick” approach to pregnant women and their bodies miscalculate the human and financial costs of their decision-making. Their approaches do not improve health outcomes for women or their children. Rather, legislators, prosecutors, and judges are misguided to believe that harsh criminal punishments and invasive civil sanctions reduce the incidents of miscarriage, stillbirth, low birth weight, genetic abnormalities, childhood asthma, obesity, diabetes, and more. Yet, these conditions are not improved, let alone cured, through criminal punishment or civil confinement of pregnant women.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Policing the WombInvisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood, pp. 129 - 148Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020