10 STEPS TOWARDS PRISON ABOLITION

A world without incarceration and police may seem a long way off, but there are plenty of things we can change on the way to building a safer world. Amy Hall examines some of them.

Protesters call for abolition of the police in New York, June 2020. 

KEVIN RC WILSON/ALAMY

1 Stop criminalizing poverty

Poor and marginalized people are the most targeted by legislation around things like homelessness and theft. On the African continent alone, at least 42 countries have laws, often dating back to colonial rule, on ‘petty offences’ such as loitering or being a ‘vagabond’. In England and Wales, a recent survey found that a quarter of the prison population were homeless before entering state custody and over two-thirds were unemployed.

2 Meeting basic needs

Poverty, inequality and exposure to violence are among the major contributing factors to criminal and harmful behaviour. So why not focus resources on meeting people’s needs for safety and decent food, housing, education and healthcare? Abolition is about building a society where prisons and the police are obsolete because we have developed new ways to stop harm and violence happening in the first place.

3 Legalize drugs

It is estimated that 2.5 million people are in prison worldwide for drug offences – over 22 per cent for possession of drugs for personal use. An additional 1.6 million are estimated to have drug related convictions.1 But prison doesn’t stop people using or selling drugs. These people should be released, have their convictions erased and the money that would be spent on their imprisonment and legal cases put towards accessible treatment programmes and provisions that focus on safety and not punishment.

4 Decriminalize sex work

Research across various countries has consistently found that criminalization makes sex workers more vulnerable to violence as they’re seen as ‘easy targets… unlikely to receive help from the police’. Criminalization also means that sex workers are more at risk of harassment and violence from law enforcement officers and less able to organize collectively. Convictions not only wrap them up in the criminal justice system, but also make it harder to find other employment.

5 Shrink prisons

More and bigger prisons are not the answers to overcrowding. Extra prison space is followed by increases in numbers of prisoners. Instead we can get behind campaigns to stop building and expanding prisons – including prisons by other names, like migrant detention centres – and push for them to be shut down, and prisoners released.

6 Defund and reduce police forces

The police act as a gateway into the criminal justice system. An increase in police officers leads to higher prison populations. Police budgets need to be cut and the money redirected into social good. A further step is to abandon legislation that expands the power of law enforcement.

7 Disarm and demilitarize

Weapons boost the police’s ability to maim and kill, to say nothing of quashing dissent. Guns escalate tense situations and even ‘less lethal’ weapons – such as tasers – can lead to devastating consequences and deaths. A start can be made by removing arms from the police in settings such as schools and hospitals. Disarming police would ideally happen alongside disarming wider society, but many other public workers – such as paramedics and firefighters – frequently enter dangerous situations without weapons. In Iceland, where there is a gun for every three people, police do not carry them on regular patrols. Schemes that supply military equipment to police forces could be closed down, as well as military training programmes for cops.

8 Take down the prison-industrial-complex

A vast, multi-million-dollar network of state and corporate interests overlap in the big business of surveillance, policing and prisons. As Corporate Watch have noted: ‘Architects and engineers pore over designs of cells and wings, construction companies build the structures and a range of other businesses create locks, alarm systems and fences.’ In the US alone, it’s been estimated that 4,000 companies profit from mass incarceration. We can campaign for the divestment of money from this web of beneficiaries.

9 Invest in alternatives

Across the globe, people have found their own ways to address and prevent violence and harm in their communities. But often this work lacks the funding and support needed to make it sustainable and scale it up. Community-based initiatives also need the same time and space to make mistakes – and learn from them – that is given to the criminal justice system.

10 Build collective strength

While working for large-scale change we can also practice everyday abolition. This requires a radical shift in mindset when it comes to how we deal with problems in our communities, including how we approach relationships with the people around us – and how we work collectively. We can also work together to fight patriarchy, white supremacy, structural classism and the other roots of much of the harm we face. After all, as abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba has said: ‘Everything worthwhile is done with other people.’

This article is from the March-April 2022 issue of New Internationalist.

Amy Hall
Amy is a co-editor at New Internationalist.

Anthony J. Nocella II, Mark Seis, and Jeff Shantz

Classic Writings in Anarchist Criminology
A Historical Dismantling of Punishment and Domination

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction: The Origins and Importance of Classic Anarchist Criminology

Why Criminology and Criminal Justice Studies Need an Anarchist Perspective

How Anarchism Contributes to Criminology and Criminal Justice

Why Have Mainstream Criminology and Criminal Justice Ignored Anarchism?

An Urgent Resource for Today

Part One: William Godwin (1756–1836)

Chapter 1: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice Book VII: Of Crimes And Punishments

CHAPTER I: LIMITATIONS OF THE DOCTRINE OF PUNISHMENT WHICH RESULT FROM THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY

CHAPTER II: GENERAL DISADVANTAGES OF COERCION

CHAPTER III: OF THE PURPOSES OF COERCION

CHAPTER IV: OF THE APPLICATION OF COERCION

Part Two: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865)

Chapter 2: What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Rights and of Government

Chapter II: Property considered as a Natural Right.—Occupation and Civil Law as Efficient Bases of Property.

Definitions.

§ 1.—Property as a Natural Right.

§ 2.—Occupation, as the Title to Property.

§ 3.—Civil Law as the Foundation and Sanction of Property.

Part Three: Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)

Chapter 3: The Program of the International Brotherhood

Chapter 4: Ethics: Morality of the State

Part Four: August Spies (1855–1887)

Chapter 5: Address of August Spies

Part Five: Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921)

Chapter 6: Law and Authority: An Anarchist Essay

Chapter 1

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter 7: Are Prisons Necessary?

Part Six: Michael Schwab And Joseph E. Gary (Schwab: 1853–1898; Gary: 1821–1906)

Chapter 8: A Convicted Anarchist’s Reply to Professor Lombroso

Part Seven: Errico Malatesta (1853–1932)

Chapter 9: Towards Anarchy

Chapter 10: Class Struggle or Class Hatred?: “People” and “Proletariat”

Chapter 11: Further Thoughts on the Question of Crime

Letter from Aldo Venturini

Malatesta’s Reply:

Part Eight: Voltairine De Cleyre (1866–1912)

Chapter 12: Crime and Punishment

Part Nine: Lucy Parsons (1853–1942)

Chapter 13: The Principles of Anarchism

Part Ten: Alexander Berkman (1870–1936)

Chapter 14: Prisons and Crime

Chapter 15: Law and Government

Part Eleven: Emma Goldman (1869–1940)

Chapter 16: The Traffic in Women

Chapter 17: Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure

Afterword

Dedication

This book is dedicated to everyone, human and nonhuman, that is locked up, tortured, and confined in every jail, detention, prison, cage, tank, handcuff, cell, padded room, unit, and chain.

Acknowledgements

We, the editors, would like to thank everyone at AK Press for believing in and supporting this book. We could not think of a better press to publish this book with than AK Press. We would also like to thank our academic departments for their support and friendship. Thank you to our human and nonhuman family and friends. Nothing is possible without others. We are all dependent on others; no one is an island. Thank you also to those today and through history who identified as anarchists and fought for the liberation and freedom for all. Finally, we would like to thank Richard J. White, Jason Del Gandio, Luis A. Fernandez, Madelynne Kinoshita, Amber E. George, and Erik Juergensmeyer who wrote reviews of the book prior to publication.

Foreword

Ruth Kinna

One of the exhibits in the Kropotkin House Museum in Dmitrov, near Moscow, is a pencil or charcoal sketch by Kropotkin depicting him in his prison cell. The space is small, dark, and frightening and it perfectly captures the isolation and bleakness of incarceration.

Kropotkin was hardly the only anarchist to gain personal experience of the prison system or to use his reflections on his imprisonment to think more broadly about the operation of the bourgeois justice system and the punishment regimes that are integral to it. As the editors of this pioneering collection argue, anarchist critique draws anarchists magnetically toward its analysis. That is not to say that anarchism is defined by criminology (understood in a narrow sense) but that the anarchist refusal to recognize the justice of our current political arrangements effectively criminalizes the doctrines anarchists espouse and encourages anarchists to place questions of order at the heart of their social theory. Anarchists often wrote about prison because, like Alexander Berkman, they were deeply affected by their experiences. Anarchists analyzed crime, punishment, discipline, and social compliance because of the critiques of power, domination, and authority they advanced.

Looking again at the substantial body of work that anarchists produced on crime and criminology reminds us of the practical force of anarchist critique. The eloquent arguments that anarchists put to their accusers were intended to highlight the translation of legal norms into policy. When the Chicago anarchists explained the tyrannical nature of the property laws enshrined in the constitution and protected by the state, they were not simply making a technical point about justice and injustice. They were explaining the consequences of the power asymmetries that the justice system upheld for millions of dispossessed and exploited peoples. It did not follow, Albert Parsons argued, “that because a man is a judge he is also just.” Leaving questions of individual virtue aside, the American courts were packed: “candidates for judgeships, throughout the United States” were “named by corporation and monopoly influences.” More than one Chief Justice had been appointed to the bench of the US Supreme Court at the behest of “leading railway magnates.” No wonder, then, that justice was systematically denied to the poor and unemployed. Parsons described the streets of Chicago filled with “30,000 men in compulsory idleness; destitution, misery and want upon every hand” facing “the First Regiment out in a street-riot drill … practicing a street-riot drill for the purpose of mowing down these wretches … the working people are to be slaughtered in cold blood, and … men are drilling upon the streets of the cities of America to butcher their fellow men when they demand the right to work and partake of the fruits of their labor.” How far things have changed since 1887 is a moot point. Of course, situations vary across the globe and unemployment is only one of the issues that attracts aggressive policing. But the thrust of Parsons’s analysis is about the institutionalization of injustice, the legality of violent repression and the unreasonable measures deployed to regulate disadvantage.

Revisiting anarchist criminology also draws attention to the alternatives that anarchists propose when they attack the prevailing order. The anarchist critique of bourgeois justice was targeted, not generalized. Indeed, it was predicated on an alternative conception of justness. Those who followed Proudhon described justice as immanent, and understood it as a contingent idea, simultaneously a condition and a practice that emerged from individual reflection or reason and social engagement. Like Nietzsche, anarchists denied the possibility of making absolute, universal moral judgments and the possibility that justice could be externally imposed. Justice emerged as part of a social process. Thus in attacking the unfairness and corruption of bourgeois justice systems, anarchists did not dismiss the possibility that rules could be broken, that norms could be transgressed or that harms could be inflicted. The point that Kropotkin made in “Law and Authority” was that military, clerical, and political elites adopted community rules and customs and gave them a new spin. Law corrupted established social practices and fixed them authoritatively so that they could always be enforced coercively and changed only when it suited the ruling elites.

Two of the pressing questions that this important and unique collection raises, then, are about the persistence of the social relations that historical anarchists decried as partial, tyrannous, and deadening and the conditions of justice that anarchists preferred in order to root alternative just practices.

So where were the 'good guys with guns'? Standing around doing nothing, as usual

Lucian K. Truscott IV,

 Salon
May 28, 2022

Uvalde law enforcement officers (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA for AFP)

Nearly 10 years have passed since the last school shooting that killed as many children as were murdered in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday. That shooting, at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, took the lives of 20 children and six adults. It was supposed to be the mass shooting that changed everything, remember? The killings were so horrific, most of the victims so young and innocent, that surely the House and the Senate could come up with some sort of "common sense" gun control measures that everyone could agree on.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Ha! Ten years have passed, and what has happened? Exactly nothing. Why? At least in part because within days of the Sandy Hook shooting, the National Rifle Association, one of the largest contributors to the political campaigns of (mostly Republican) politicians in the country, swung into action to stop any momentum for new gun laws before they could even get going.

Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the NRA, called a press conference in Washington and with a single sentence, began a refrain about guns and gun violence and gun control that is still with us today: "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun," LaPierre said that day. What we might call the LaPierre Rule has become gospel for gun owners, gun manufacturers, and the political party that opposes any sort of gun control, the Republican Party. LaPierre's Rule devolved into sub-rules, such as this gem: The solution to gun violence isn't fewer guns, it's more guns in the hands of more people.

RELATED: Uvalde shooting timeline exposes an ugly truth: Cops have no legal duty to protect you

The NRA began a campaign after Sandy Hook to put an armed police officer in every school and to push for "open carry" laws across the country. These are state laws that allow you to openly carry a gun — of any kind, handgun or rifle — on your person or in your car without a permit. At this point, 31 states have open carry laws on their books. Fifteen states require a permit to carry a handgun, and only five, including the District of Columbia, have laws that ban the carrying of handguns in public.

Last year, the state of Texas passed its own law allowing the open carrying of handguns and other firearms without a permit. That law was passed less than two years after mass shootings in El Paso and Odessa killed 30 people. The solution to bad guys having guns is more guns, see? Texans don't want to make guns harder to buy, or to limit the times and places citizens can carry their guns. They want to make it easier. They want more guns on the street, not fewer guns.

Figures on gun ownership in Texas vary. One study I saw, by World Population Review, says that 45.7 percent of Texas citizens over the age of 18 own a gun. Another study, by the Rand Corporation, says that 37 percent of adults in Texas live in a household with a firearm. A recent report on NBC said that Texas has the highest percentage of gun ownership in the country. After the shooting on Tuesday, a tweet by Gov. Greg Abbott from 2015 surfaced in which he said, "I'm EMBARRASSED: Texas #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind CALIFORNIA. Let's pick up the pace Texans." The tweet was posted following a report in the Houston Chronicle that gun purchases in Texas had topped one million for the year.

In Uvalde, the "good guys with guns" wearing police uniforms stood around for almost an hour before storming a classroom and killing the murderer of 19 children and two teachers.

No matter which figure you use, that's one hell of a lot of "good guys with a gun" in the state of Texas, don't you think? If all that's necessary to take down a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, the question after the Uvalde shooting is, where were they? Even the good guys with guns wearing police uniforms, it was revealed on Friday, waited almost an hour before they stormed the classroom where the shooter was, and 19 of them waited until they could be backed up by a SWAT team from the Border Patrol before they finally used their guns to kill the murderer of 19 children and two teachers.

The shooter, an 18-year-old resident of Uvalde, had purchased two AR-15 semiautomatic rifles and more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition and 50 — fifty — high-capacity magazines only days after his birthday on May 16. Texas laws require only that you be 18 years old to buy a rifle in the state, but at that age, you can buy any kind of rifle, including a semiautomatic AR-15 style weapon. The shooter was able to buy two of the AR-15s in the days after his birthday when he was apparently already making plans to kill children at an elementary school in Uvalde. Much has been made of the fact that he was not old enough to buy a beer, but he was old enough to buy a rifle capable of firing two to three bullets per second. He was also able to buy the seven 30-round magazines, containing at least 210 bullets.

On Friday we heard reports that citizens of Uvalde, including at least one parent of a child who was killed, were outside the school yelling at armed police officers to go inside and take on the shooter. Cell phone video shot at the scene at 12:37 p.m., while the shooter was inside the school killing children, show one officer holding up his hands trying to prevent a person from filming him and shooing a crowd of people away from the doors of the school. One person can be heard calling to the others that they should enter the school and storm the shooter because the cops aren't doing anything. Another video shot at the same time showed numerous police officers in full tactical gear restraining parents who were trying to enter the school to retrieve their children. One father was pepper-sprayed in the face and a mother was handcuffed. In the background, a police officer in armored gear is hiding behind the bed of a pickup truck aiming his AR-style police rifle at the door of the school.

So some of the good guys with guns were doing exactly what so many cops are accused of every day: menacing civilians and pushing them around and threatening to arrest them for doing nothing that was even remotely illegal.

A spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety said Friday that the gunman was in the school for nearly an hour before a SWAT team from the Border Patrol arrived and was able to get into the classroom where he was and kill him. By that time, all the children in the classroom were dead.

Also absent from the scene in Uvalde were any of the 13 million people who own guns in the state of Texas, all those good guys with guns that Wayne LaPierre has told us are the only thing that can stop "a bad guy with a gun."

Watching the coverage of the aftermath of mass shootings in this country has become commonplace. The shooting at the Tops Supermarket in Buffalo happened two weeks ago, and here we are looking at images of yet another exterior of yet another building where someone carrying an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle walked in and killed people, this time children this time. The scene is always the same: Heavily armed police officers clad in camouflage uniforms, protected by bulletproof vests and wearing helmets, along with an entire panoply of military-style tactical gear, are milling around talking to each other. A few of them are dispatched to do what the army calls "set up a perimeter," which in the case of mass shootings amounts to stringing yellow crime-scene tape around the scene and then guarding it so civilians can't get near the scene and presumably contaminate evidence. In Uvalde, at least one armored personnel carrier could be seen near the school after all the shooting was over and all the kids were dead.

There are always a lot of heavily armed police officers at the scene of mass shootings after they have occurred. It is beyond me why they think it's necessary to show up looking like they're about to be dispatched to serve on the front lines in Ukraine or some other war zone. But there they are, wearing enough body armor and carrying enough firepower to assault an infantry battalion, and what are they doing? Standing around.

It's all of a piece. Every time there is another mass shooting, more and more money floods into the budgets of police departments and they go out and buy military-spec M-4 rifles and military-spec shotguns and military-spec body armor and military-spec helmets and military-style camouflage uniforms. Why? Because they're cool, that's why. If they're going to go up against one of these mass shooters, every one of whom is outfitted in military-style tactical gear and carrying military-style AR-15 rifles, then by God, they're not going to be one-upped! Just like Greg Abbott and his exhortation to Texans to buy more guns so they could catch up with California (!), the cops are going to buy more guns and more body armor — more of everything — so they can be ready the next time they're called upon to stand around in a parking lot of a building after 10 or 20 people have been shot and their dead bodies are strewn around the floor somewhere inside.

There's a weird, ironic perfection to the fact that the NRA's convention began on Friday in Houston, offering Wayne LaPierre, who is still the CEO of that august organization of gun-lovers, the chance to come up with yet another exhortation to his masses. One year they tried "my dead hands," as in, if you want my guns you'll have to pry them from my dead hands. Then came Wayne's good guys with guns.

Maybe this year Wayne will explain to us that the reason we've had all these school shootings and mass killings is because we don't have enough good guys with guns. More good guys! More guns! That'll show these mass murderers! Next time one of them shoots up a school, we'll have even more people standing around outside picking their camo-clad asses as the bodies of the dead lie there inside submitting to the ministrations of the crime scene investigators.

More guns, and more crime scene investigators! That'll show 'em that in Texas, we're second to nobody!

Police don't stop crime -- so what are they for?

John Stoehr
May 28, 2022

Police outside Robb Elementary School following a shooting on May 24, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas.

 © Dario Lopez-Mills, AP

Sometimes it’s the little things that evoke the biggest feels. I have been writing about the Uvalde massacre most of the week. I have been so focused on facts and arguments, I haven’t sobbed. But the tears came this morning after reading a report by KENS, a TV news station local to that Texas community, where 19 fourth-graders were shot to pieces.

The report was an eyewitness account by a survivor of the shooting. The boy, whom the reporter did not identify, said he and a friend “heard the shooting through the door.” He added that, “I told my friend to hide under something so he won't find us. I was hiding hard. And I was telling my friend to not talk because he is going to hear us.”

The boy told the reporter what happened after police came through the classroom door Salvador Ramos had locked behind him. “When the cops came, the cop said: 'Yell if you need help!' And one of the people in my class said 'help.' The guy overheard and he came in and shot her.”

That’s it. That’s the detail that got me. A child desperately needing to trust a caring adult. A child shot to pieces for needing and trusting.

Because of a cop’s incompetence.

The boy’s eyewitness account is more damning in context.

The Post reported Thursday that Ramos strolled into the school “unobstructed” with a long gun. Officials had said he encountered three cops. First, an in-school cop. Then, two others arriving on the scene. Officials had said the latter two officers sustained injuries.

Turns out all that was a lie.

Police arrived “four minutes” after Ramos entered the building, officials conceded. Meanwhile, while Ramos was shooting 19 fourth-graders to pieces, they dithered outside for an hour.

A video shows some carrying semiautomatic rifles. It shows one cop with his taser drawn, at the ready. Another cop restrains what appears to be a parent in order to prevent them from entering the building.

This is the context in which the boy’s testimony is even more damning than the incompetent cop who got a girl killed for needing to trust.


Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles were the boy’s teachers, the KENS reporter said. They were shot to pieces. They saved his life, he said.

“They were nice teachers," he said.

"They went in front of my classmates to help."

“To save them.”

We have entered a familiar period after shooting massacres during which officials justify what police did and why. We are hearing Thin Blue Line advocates saying it was reasonable to hang back. After all, the scene was dangerous. The suspect had a semiautomatic rifle.

This familiar pattern, by which police authorities presume the public is on their side, and won’t question them too much, is fraying as more details emerge as to what the police didn’t do and why they didn’t do it.

On the video, you can hear rapid-fire gunshots followed by mothers wailing in despair, pleading with armed police to save their kids.

The good guys with the guns were not that good. Indeed, they were deadly. It was the teachers, who were not armed, who did the most to save their students. The real heroes are dead. The cowards are alive.

But the living get to write history.

Matter of fact, police departments across the country do as much to influence public opinion as they do “crime fighting.” Their influence is so great the public finds it completely understandable when cops refuse doing their jobs in the face of mere scrutiny. It’s so strong cops can get away with murder on account of murder being seen as a tragic but sometimes necessary response to the dangers of facing an infestation of criminals and crime. It’s so huge few complain about Uvalde’s cop shop sucking up 40 percent of the town’s yearly budget.

The influence of American police departments on public opinion is deeply rooted in the reason cop shops exist – yes, to “protect and serve,” sometimes, but more often to serve as the last line of defense against democratic forces threatening to flatten the old orders of social and political power. Cops are white power incarnate.

So expect to hear familiar rhetoric about “brave men and women in uniform who put their lives on the line to protect communities.”

Don’t believe it.

Turn that story around.

What are cops for?

First, they don’t stop crime.

“If larger police forces make us safe, then by that logic, the U.S. would already be the safest society in the world as over $115 billion is spent on policing a year, a budget larger than any other country’s military budget except for China,” wrote Kinjo Kiema. “Over 50 years of crime data shows only 2 percent of crimes end in conviction. Police don’t stop crime that has occurred, nor do they prevent it from happening.”

Second, police don’t stop violence.

“When researchers account for the impacts of socio-economic and other factors, the reality that police don’t protect us from violence — because their purpose is to use violence to maintain ‘order’ premised on existing relations of power — becomes more clear,” according to research by activists Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie.

Third, police create violence.

“Police are violence workers,” Kaba and Ritchie wrote. “Their response to violence is more violence or the threat of violence. This means more police, police contact and police resources automatically means more violence because cops add their own violence to what’s already” there.

“They are the sources of violence.”

TKTK

What are police for?

As I’m writing this, the Times reports that Border Patrol agents arrived earlier than previously known. But when they got there, the local Uvalde cops “would not allow them to go after the gunman who had opened fire on students inside the school, according to two officials.”

They “had driven up from the Mexican border, one official said. The official said it was not clear to the federal agents why their team was needed, and why the local SWAT team did not respond.”

As I’m writing, the LA Times reported that the kids “begged for police to enter their classroom and save them, repeatedly calling 911, as a team of 19 police officers waited in the corridor for an hour because a commander believed the situation had shifted from active shooter to a barricade subject, a Texas law enforcement officer said today.”

They don’t stop crime.

They don’t stop violence.

They create violence.

That’s another detail that gets me. We need to trust law enforcement.

Yet law enforcement so often has us wondering why we should.

John Stoehr is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative; a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly; a contributing editor for Religion Dispatches; and senior editor at Alternet. Follow him @johnastoehr.

Criminalizing abortion is a key feature of dismantling the social safety net

Noah Berlatsky
May 30, 2022

Activists supporting a woman's right to choose to have an abortion 

protested in March 2020 outside the US Supreme Court(AFP)

Criminalizing women’s health care is likely to harm and impoverish women. The GOP’s opposition to reproductive health care is consistent with its class war on working class and poor people.

Pushing kids into poverty is a feature of abortion policy, not a bug.

Earlier this month, a draft Supreme Court opinion was leaked suggesting the court is ready to overturn Roe. That would make it possible for states to pass draconian laws criminalizing abortion. States with Republican governments are already gearing up.

In Senate testimony following the leak, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen argued that “eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades.”

Yellen is in line with an amicus brief supporting abortion rights filed by nearly 155 economists. The brief summarizes a range of studies showing that abortion access has had sweeping effects on the health and economic wellbeing of women and pregnant people.

The brief cites studies showing that abortion access reduced teen motherhood by 34 percent and teen marriage by 20 percent. It also cites research finding abortion access increased the likelihood of Black teenage women graduating from high school by around 23 percentage points. For Black women attending college, it was 23 to 27 points.

Perhaps the most striking evidence in the brief is a study that followed outcomes for people who sought and obtained abortions just before the gestational limit cut off, and those who sought them but were turned away because they were just past the gestational limit.

The study found both groups had similar financial outlooks before abortions. Immediately after seeking abortions, however, the turned-away group experienced major economic struggles, including a 78 percent increase in past-due debt and an 81 percent increase in paperwork related to bankruptcies, evictions and court judgements.

Ideally, failing to receive an abortion should not result in major financial hardship. For that matter, no child should experience major financial hardship in a wealthy country like the US. Parents should have the resources they need to care for their families.

The fact is that raising children is expensive and difficult in the US, especially for the poor. The cost of raising a child through age 17 in the US is about $233,000, according to USDA estimates.

Child care, to list just one expense, is broadly unaffordable. Infant care costs on average $11,000 a year. Only one in six families eligible for child care subsidies receive them. Those subsidies generally cover a fraction of care, even for those who receive them.

If the Republicans want to reduce incentives for abortion and show they care about children, they’d be eager to provide more money for child care and more resources for families with infants.

As Roe is ready to fall, the Republicans have started to mutter half-heartedly about maybe perhaps possibly sorta kinda providing some, a little, more resources for families raising young children.

But the fact is that Republicans have in the past consistently fought viciously against programs designed to help parents and families.

Biden proposed a $1.8 trillion plan to provide for universal pre-K, a national childcare program and tuition-free community college.

Republicans like US Senator Marsha Blackburn immediately labeled Biden’s proposal a socialist plot. Senate wannabe JD Vance said funding childcare was “class war against normal people” because it was encouraging mothers to work instead of staying home with families.

So if the Republicans want mothers to stay home and not work, they must want to provide them with the money to do that, right?

Ha, no.

The Democratic Congress, at Biden’s urging, passed an expanded Child Tax Credit in 2021. It provided hundreds in cash payments for each child in low-income families. It lifted millions of kids out of poverty.

But when the expanded tax credit came up for renewal, Republicans and one conservative Senate Democrat, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, scuttled it. Manchin — channeling the arguments of Republicans — insisted the tax credit be predicated on a work requirement.

When Biden tries to provide aid for child care, so parents with young children can work, the Republicans say mothers should stay home.

When he tries to provide aid to families, so children aren’t engulfed by poverty, the Republicans say mothers have to work.

It’s almost as if the GOP’s goal is impoverishing children.

The Republicans say they are against abortion, because they value fetal life, which they insist is synonymous with the lives of children.

But if the Republicans actually cared about children, they would support programs to help children. If they cared about the well-being of families, they would support programs to help families.

Attacking abortion is apiece with shredding the safety net.

It’s not about life.

It’s about preserving a social order in which the poor have few options except humiliating themselves for the few bones thrown at them.

It’s about making sure women in particular are kept in their place as second class citizens, desperate and dependent, punished for working or for failing to work, for having children or failing to have them.

In an ideal world, pregnant people would decide whether to have abortions without worrying about crushing poverty if they make the wrong decision. No one who is pregnant, and no family, should worry about their children not having enough to eat, or a place to live.

A world in which people have the resources they need is a world in which people have the health care resources they need. And that absolutely includes the reproductive health care they need.

“Policing the Womb”: Law Professor Michele Goodwin on SCOTUS, Anti-Abortion Laws & the New Jane Crow

STORY MAY 30, 2022

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GUESTS Michele Goodwin

founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy, host of the podcast On the Issues with Michele Goodwin and a chancellor’s professor at University of California, Irvine.


As the Supreme Court appears poised to strike down Roe v. Wade, we speak with law professor Michele Goodwin, author of “Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood.” She describes how the U.S. has historically endangered and denied essential health services to Black and Brown women, and calls new abortion restrictions “the new Jane Crow,” warning that they will further criminalize reproductive health and encourage medical professionals to breach their patients’ confidentiality and report self-administered abortions to law enforcement.

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AMY GOODMAN: Today, a Democracy Now! special. The Supreme Court appears poised to overturn abortion rights. Earlier this month, Politico published a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion which showed the court is set to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that’s guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights for a half a century. If Roe is overturned, 13 states have so-called trigger laws that would make abortion illegal as soon as the court rules. Another 13 are expected to enact abortion bans soon after the court issues its ruling in the case known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.

It was on the eve of the court’s oral arguments in the Dobbs case in November that law professor Michele Goodwin wrote a guest essay in The New York Times. It was headlined “I Was Raped by My Father. An Abortion Saved My Life.” I recently interviewed Michele Goodwin. I began by quoting from her article. A warning to our viewers and listeners: This segment includes descriptions of sexual violence.


AMY GOODMAN: “On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the constitutionality of a 15-week abortion ban in Mississippi that provides no exceptions in cases of rape or incest. What’s at stake in this case matters to the countless girls and women who have been raped — including those who, like me, were raped by a father, an uncle or another family member.


“It was the early morning of my 10th birthday the first time that I was raped by my father. It would not be the last. The shock was so severe that I temporarily went blind before I began the fifth grade a few weeks later. By the time the school year began, my father had taken me to see a battery of doctors — a medical explanation would paper over the fact that the trauma caused by his sexual violence had caused my body to shut down.


“The physiological suffering that I endured included severe migraines, hair loss and even gray hair — at 10 years old. While other girls may have longed for puberty, I loathed the idea of it. My body became a vessel that was not mine. It had been taken from me. I lived in fear of the night, and the footsteps outside my bedroom door.”


Those are the opening words of Michele Goodwin’s New York Times guest essay last November headlined “I Was Raped by My Father. An Abortion Saved My Life,” again, written on the eve of the court’s decision that could overturn the constitutional right to abortion.


Michele Goodwin joins us now. She’s chancellor’s professor at University of California, Irvine School of Law, founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy, and has written the book, Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood.


Professor Goodwin, welcome back to Democracy Now! We appreciate you joining us again this week. Can you start off by talking about why you chose to write that essay?


MICHELE GOODWIN: Amy, it’s important that we all understand that the new aspect of anti-abortion provisions includes an aspect that we would not have seen even five years ago. And that is that they make no exceptions for cases of rape or incest.


Now, these laws, on their own, are really quite chilling and horrific when we understand, just as a baseline, the importance of reproductive liberty and freedom and when we understand that a woman or girl is 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by an abortion in the United States. So, that’s just a baseline anyway. But then, when we add onto it that these laws have this kind of punitive aspect, as well, such that if you have been raped or that you have somehow survived incest, that you, too, may no longer have an exception that would provide for the ability to terminate a pregnancy, then we really understand that these laws have nothing to do, and they never have had anything to do, with protecting, respecting the autonomy, the dignity, the privacy of women or girls. In fact, they’re just simply cruel types of laws that are power plays that fit into a history of controlling women’s bodies and a history, quite specifically, of controlling the bodies of Black and Brown women. I mean, it’s been all women who have been subjected to the cruelties of such laws, but they have a particularly pernicious effect when we actually understand the historical implications, too.


As to rape and incest, I thought it was really important to legitimize that conversation and move us away from the taboo where we’re not supposed to talk about those things and where, clearly, the Supreme Court is not talking about that at all, as it was not raised in oral arguments. And in the leaked draft opinion that was circulated this week, Justice Alito does not even bother to actually mention rape or incest in any part of the nearly 100-page draft opinion.


AMY GOODMAN: When you talk about the health of African American women, also the mortality rate, maternal mortality rate of African American women, talk more — go more deeply into how these laws so deeply affect pregnant people all over the country, but particularly African American women and low-income women.


MICHELE GOODWIN: That’s right. I mean, as a general matter, we should all be horrified, because as a general matter, Black women are the canaries in the coal mine. What happens to them eventually reaches everybody else, though not always to the same degree. And that’s also been historically true, as well, as you look at states like Mississippi, Alabama, Texas.


You know, as a national matter, Black women are nearly four times more likely to die than white women by carrying pregnancies to term, three-and-a-half times more likely. But when you drill that number down and you actually peer under the hood and you look in states such as I’ve mentioned and you look even deeper within certain counties that have high populations of Black women, and you see then, well, in those places, Black women are five, 10, 15, 17 times more likely to die by carrying pregnancies to term than their white counterpart. And if you look at that national statistic that I gave you, that women generally are 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than an abortion, well, in Mississippi, it’s over 100 times more likely to die — in fact, nearly 180 times more likely to die — if you’re a Black woman in Mississippi and you’re coerced into carrying a pregnancy to term. You’re that much more likely to die than by having an abortion.


And so, these alarming, really alarming statistics, that in any other category of health, if we heard that, the alarm bells would be ringing, and the government would be saying, you know, “Don’t choose the alternative at all. We want to keep you alive.” But what’s very interesting, when it comes to pregnancy and pronatalism in this country, it’s not about actually caring about the health of women, girls, people who can become pregnant. Not at all. Those alarm bells do not ring, even though the data that I’ve just shared with you comes from the CDC. It comes from the departments of health in these individual states. This is not data that’s being made up by people who are pro-choice. This is data that we’re getting from the governments in Florida, in Texas. This is Governor Abbott’s data that helps us to know that Texas is one of the most dangerous places in the entire developed world for a person to be pregnant.


AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the Louisiana law — well, it’s not a law yet, it’s been proposed — that makes the destruction of a fertilized human egg at any stage of its development an act of murder, punishable presumably by Louisiana’s death penalty. I mean, this is astounding. You’re talking about — what about a person who works in a fertility clinic, who is holding a test tube —


MICHELE GOODWIN: Sure.


AMY GOODMAN: — with a fertilized egg and drops that test tube? Could they be charged with murder?


MICHELE GOODWIN: Well, this is where we’re in a space that I call the New Jane Crow, these laws that are not rational, they’re quite illogical, and, even more, they’re punitive, they’re cruel, they’re absolutely excessive. You know, if you think about the work of Pauli Murray, she was in many ways the godmother of the civil rights movement. Thurgood Marshall said that the book that she wrote on race laws was the Bible of the civil rights movement. And it’s about 800 pages, single-spaced, all of these crazy, really crazy Jim Crow laws, such as, you know, Black people can’t play checkers in the park — that ridiculous, that you think, “Who in the world thought of that?” — and would connect a fine and also criminal punishment if Black people are caught playing checkers in the park.


Well, in the New Jane Crow, we see laws such as and propositions such as what you’ve just described. They make absolutely no sense, but they’re absolutely cruel. And they’re meant to cause fear and to chill behavior. And their reach is beyond what we could grasp or even imagine. And that’s also really what Policing the Womb is about. It is a warning call, because we’ve already seen, again, as Black women in the canaries — canaries in the coal mine, we’ve seen that kind of punitive punishment, with Black women being dragged out of hospitals in shackles and chains in the late 1980s and '90s because they were imperfect in how they carried their pregnancies — no exact law saying that they could or should be dragged out of hospitals in such punitive ways — or giving birth in prison and on toilets and concrete floors. But the specter of policing their pregnancies, this kind of specter that the state owns everything with regard to your reproductive capacities, leads us into a space where there's dramatic surveillance. And it’s frightening for people. And that’s what these laws are meant to do. Yes, they’ll criminally punish, and possibly even death sentence, but they’re meant to instill fear in people.


AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you look at a most recent case that got a good amount of attention. It was the case of Lizelle Herrera. She is the Latinx woman in Texas who was charged with murder for, quote-unquote, a “self-induced” abortion. Now, because of groups like the Frontera Fund and women of color massively protesting, very much now that’s the exception to the rule. And she was released, and the charges were dropped. But if the Supreme Court rules as we think it will, based on this leak, this will become the rule, the rule of law.


MICHELE GOODWIN: Yes. Well, what we’ll see is just like in Jim Crow times or antebellum times. There are places where women can be free and girls can be free and may not have to worry. And even there, I would put some caution around it, because in California just a couple years ago, in the valley, there was a prosecutor who attempted to prosecute — in fact, was prosecuting — a woman for murder in the case of her stillbirth.


But, yes, what we will begin to see is that there will be states where people will not be free, where they will in fact be policed. And that kind of policing will also be connected to sex profiling, just like racial profiling — right? — this hyper-intensive look at what are girls and women doing with their bodies. There will be a turn to and pressure on nurses, on doctors, on medical staff to breach millennia-old practices of confidentiality between themselves and their patients. And they will breach that and will share that information, just as we saw in that case, with law enforcement. And then the next step will be arrest.


And this is not just simply anecdotal. As I record in my book, in the state of Alabama, already there have been hundreds of women who have come under the inspection of the state, charged and arrested under fetal endangerment — or child endangerment, in that case — laws, laws that would extend child, the definition of a child, to a fetus. And in Alabama, as I’ve mentioned, Black women, the canaries in the coal mine there, the majority of those women happen to be white. But they all are poor, or the vast majority of them are poor or working-class women, who have already come under the attention of the state in this prurient kind of way.


So what we have to understand is just what we’ve seen at the Supreme Court level, this attack that’s finally reached its pinnacle up to the Supreme Court to dismantle Roe v. Wade, this work has had tentacles. And it’s been working to criminalize women and also to impose civil punishments associated with pregnancy.


AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Professor Goodwin, about the medication abortion, the pill. The L.A. Times’ lead story, “Abortion pills: A post-Roe game changer — and the next battleground.” The opening line, “The future of abortion in the U.S. is moving to the mailbox.” It’s also the front-page story today of The New York Times, “In Abortion Fight, Pills Could Be the Next Focus.” And it might surprise some people to know that more than half of abortions in the United States are result of taking these pills. You just did a podcast on this. Can you talk about this issue?


MICHELE GOODWIN: That’s right. That’s right. So, in Europe, this has been liberalized for decades. And due to political machinations and with the Food and Drug Administration, which at times can be captured by outside sources, it was stalled in the United States. But now, for more than a decade, just about a decade in the United States, we have a significant number of pregnancy terminations, abortions, being done through medication. They’re incredibly safe. The World Health Organization has compared an abortion to the safety of a penicillin shot. So these pills are very, very safe.


It’s worth noting that during the Trump administration, of over 22,000 drugs that one could receive in the mail during the height of COVID, medication abortion, these pills, were the only ones where a person had to go to a clinic, to a hospital, in order to receive them. So there is a way in which they’ve been selected out for a different kind of treatment than any other kind of prescription.


That said, they are accessible. And for people who are wondering now, women who are wondering now what comes next, well, these pills are accessible, and find a source where you are able to get them. And there are underground sources, as well, that are online, where folks are told this is how you order them, and they can be sent to a friend, and they can get them to you. There are a myriad ways of getting that done.


But the attack will be exactly that. The attack will come to the mailbox in order to try to shut down access to abortion in every means possible, including not just shutting down the clinics where surgical abortions can take place, but also searching the mailbox in some form of a way. So we’ll begin to see myriad laws being shaped that try to get at that, that makes it illegal to receive pills in the mail, that make it illegal to send pills in the mail, and any other. I mean, it’s amazing the kinds of innovations that these legislators can come up with to try to curb rights and dismantle rights. And they’re not very good and not committed to actually saving the lives of people who actually end up pregnant, want to stay pregnant or don’t want to stay pregnant.


AMY GOODMAN: Professor Goodwin, in your book, Policing the Womb, you write, “Arguably, abortion has become so fundamentally intertwined linguistically and conceptually with the terminology of 'reproductive privacy' and 'reproductive rights' that little else fits within the taxonomy. This is a mistake,” you write. Why?


MICHELE GOODWIN: Well, it’s been a mistake, when you think about the following. If you think about civil rights, that’s a plural. It has an “S” on it. And as having an “S” on it, it means that we’re not just talking about Brown v. Board of Education, right? We’re talking about education, employment, housing, the ability to swim in the pool in your neighborhood and walk through the park. We’re talking about accommodations in all of those areas.


And when we center just one aspect within abortion rights or within reproductive rights, then we’re talking just about abortion. Then we’re missing sex education, access to contraception. We’re missing conversations about sterilization. We’re missing all of everything else. And that kind of blind spot then means a failure to pay attention to many of the other areas where there have already been encroachments on reproductive health rights and justice.


And so, this is why we’ve missed largely what’s been happening to Black and Brown women, the kind of most horrific treatment by government during their pregnancies. This is how the agenda of personhood was missed in the 1980s and ’90s when it was being inflicted on Black women. You know, when prosecutors are claiming that your embryo or your fetus is a living born child — and it is not, by any constitutional definition — then everybody should be alarmed. But in the 1980s and ’90s, it completely missed those in the reproductive rights movement who were only focusing on abortion.


But here’s the other thing, Amy. Given the histories of coercion and coercive reproduction in the United States, that dates back to the forced kidnap and trafficking of Black women, then we should all be concerned about the fact that Black women, for centuries in this country, have not been accorded dignity when they are carrying pregnancies to term, and when they’re carrying pregnancies to term that they want. And we should want it all. We should want that women should be able to survive and have dignity when they are pregnant and want to be pregnant. And we should also care about government coercively forcing women to carry pregnancies that they don’t want, for the benefit of random state legislators that these women do not even know.

AMY GOODMAN: Michele Goodwin is chancellor’s professor at University of California, Irvine School of Law. When we come back, I ask about her book, Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as I continue my conversation with Michele Goodwin, chancellor’s professor of law at the University of California, Irvine. I asked her about the leaked draft opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade, written by Justice Samuel Alito. In part of his ruling, Alito provides a list of anti-abortion laws from various U.S. states enacted between 1850 and 1919. When these laws were passed, women did not have the right to vote. Most African Americans were either legally enslaved or, after emancipation, subjected to racial terrorism and lynching at the hands of law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan. In his rewriting of history, Justice Alito says traditions from these eras should dictate current law. I asked Professor Goodwin to talk about Alito’s argument and the history she tells in her book, Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood.


MICHELE GOODWIN: That’s right. It’s a very interesting cherry picking, the kind of selectivity that Justice Alito brings to this, which in so many ways is also completely alarming, alarming for the fact that it is not an accurate account. This draft opinion is stunning and alarming for what it omits. It is stunning for the citations that are chosen in it, and its also historical erasures. And that’s just to start, to just level start.


So, this period of time that he chooses to select ignores the period before, when abortions were not criminalized. The Pilgrims performed abortions. Indigenous people, on whose lands we are doing this program, performed abortions and all myriad form of healthcare. There were at that point not men running around with stethoscopes and lab coats. Obstetrics and gynecology was not even a field at the founding of the United States. This period that he talks about is a period that leads up to the Civil War. It is a period of time in which abortion, curiously, becomes criminalized because 100% — nearly 100% of reproductive healthcare was being done by women. About half of those were Black women, and then there were Indigenous women and white women. And these were the midwives. And the midwives — and if anyone thinks about it, well, that makes sense that 2,000 years ago there weren’t guys with stethoscopes and lab coats saying, “I’m your gynecologist.” It just simply did not exist, right? These were women doing the care and work for women.


But in a period of time leading up to the Civil War, obstetrics and gynecology slowly becomes a field. And there are men like Horatio Storer and Joseph DeLee, and then there had been Marion Sims, a notoriously terroristic gynecologist who experimented on Black women and failed to even provide them — denied them pain relief. Right? No anesthesia for them. He wrote in his autobiography, in fact, Amy, how he would have epiphanies in the middle of the night and then take his knives and other tools and literally cut into the bodies of Black women for his middle-of-the-night experimentations and epiphanies. He is considered the godfather of gynecology. A statue was erected in his honor in Central Park. But I digress.


But it’s those guys who helped to lead a movement against midwives. And the way in which this movement takes shape is to say, “Well, they’re doing something immoral, and that is abortion.” It was not about abortions; it was about monopolizing a field. And they were successful at leveraging themselves to be able to push midwives out of reproductive healthcare, take over this field for themselves. I mean, between that period of time that he quotes, that Justice Alito quotes, and the beginning of the 20th century, we go from 100% of reproductive healthcare being done by midwives to 1% at the beginning of the 20th century. And what was used to do that was to criminalize abortion. And these were very strategic doctors.


And I’ll just add one more point to it. This was also so deeply racialized, because they wrote about — their words, not mine — about how white women needed to use their loins and go north, south, east and west. It’s this collection of doctors who pushed for anti-immigration campaigns against people who were coming from Asian countries. It’s a period of our history that’s worth unpacking, not just for reproductive rights but for the racism and its intimacy with white supremacy.


AMY GOODMAN: Professor Goodwin, you write about policing and criminalization around abortion, but also around women who want to have children. Can you tell us the story, the highly disturbing story you describe in your book, of Marlise Muñoz in Texas?


MICHELE GOODWIN: Yes. I mean, when we think about this as, again, the plural of reproductive rights and begin to look beyond abortion, then we see the tactics that have been invested in by this anti-woman, anti-trans — and it’s all together, and with a very specific focus on Black and Brown women, but a reach that goes everywhere.


Marlise Muñoz was a healthcare worker. She was an EMT. And she had a brain aneurysm, and she was pregnant. She experienced brain death. Brain death is well defined, and has been well defined and accepted for half a century in the United States. At the period of brain death, a person who has a “do not resuscitate” order would then not be resuscitated, allowed for the body to physically die, and cremated or buried or whatever that person has decided, or the family members. But in Texas and in nearly three dozen states, there’s what are called medical exclusion laws. The name doesn’t necessarily tell us what substantively it does. Substantively, what it does is it takes away that kind of decision-making for a woman who is pregnant.


So, in Marlise’s case, when she was rushed to the hospital, the hospital officials decided that she should be on a life-sustaining treatment. Only she was brain dead. Marlise’s husband, Erick Muñoz, and her parents said, “We do not want her on life support. She is brain dead. We want to be able to, with dignity, have her life come to a close.” Twice, she was medically sustained. There was a tracheotomy that was performed. The hospital ultimately taped her eyes shut, because it put her on a bed that violently rocks back and forth. There were pro-life protesters that came to the hospital and protested outside, saying that medical science didn’t matter, that in a week Marlise would be alive.


For 62 days, Marlise’s body was forced to be an incubator for a fetus that was not developing well at all, and against the will of her husband and her parents. They actually had to sue the state of Texas in order for Marlise to be released from the hospital and taken off of life support. She was dead. It is incontrovertible that brain death is death in the United States — except now if you happen to be pregnant person, a pregnant woman. Then, brain death somehow, in these anti-abortion states, means something different. And it is a tragic case in Marlise’s case. Her father talked about how her skin had become so hard, her body had become so hard, it was like a mannequin, touching her. The stench was so severe that it was hard for people to come into the room. But this is what the state of Texas is seeking to normalize.


AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking with professor Michele Goodwin. The stories you tell in this book, like of Bei Bei Shuai in Indiana, an immigrant woman from China who attempted suicide. If you can tell us her story? She was pregnant, and the fact that she was charged with murder.


MICHELE GOODWIN: Days before Christmas a few years ago, Bei Bei Shuai was in a parking lot, and her boyfriend threw money at her and told her that he was going away and never wanted to see her again. Distraught, Bei Bei Shuai sought to kill herself. She got rat poison. And it’s interesting to note that for women in China who are attempting to commit suicide, it’s not unusual to use — turn to pesticides and things like rat poison. Well, she ate five — six packets of rat poison in order to kill herself.


She survived, because her friends found her, rushed her to the hospital, where doctors engaged in very aggressive treatments to try to save Bei Bei Shuai’s life and to also try to preserve and save the fetus, as well. Angel was her child that was born and survived for four days and then died. Doctors were not clear exactly why and how Angel died. Angel could have died because of the very aggressive life-sustaining treatments that they tried to provide. They didn’t know.


In any case, Bei Bei Shuai was charged with first-degree murder. The prosecutors in the state of Indiana sought over 40 years of incarceration for Bei Bei Shuai. They charged her with first-degree murder and also attempted feticide. At the time in which the laws for feticide were enacted in the state, legislators said this would never be used against women and that the purpose for them was actually to go after people, men, who beat up their girlfriends and wives during pregnancy. But that was not the case in Bei Bei Shuai’s scenario. And what’s interesting to note there, Amy, is that in the state of Indiana, it’s not a crime to attempt to commit suicide. It is not a crime. And yet prosecutors went after Bei Bei Shuai as a pregnant person because she attempted to commit suicide while pregnant.


And I want to just add one other piece to that, too, that really helps us to see just how cruel the punishment is. In years prior to that, in using this feticide law, prosecutors sought three years in connection with a woman being stabbed to death while pregnant by her boyfriend — three years in his case for what happened to the fetus. In a case involving a bank robber who robbed a bank and shot a teller in the belly twice, killing twins, it was five years. In Bei Bei Shuai’s case, 40 years. And I think that really helps to establish just what this policing means and how it is a very cruel and punitive turn towards control of women.


AMY GOODMAN: You also note, Professor Goodwin, that hospitals and hospital staff serve as surrogates of the state. I mean, I go back to the Lizelle Herrera case, the Latina woman in Texas who was charged with murder, who apparently went to the hospital and, they said, had — was dealing with a self-induced abortion. We don’t know the details exactly. But it was clearly people in the hospital who is believed were involved with talking to the state that got her charged. The charges were dropped, because the public was so outraged by what happened to her. And this was very recent.


MICHELE GOODWIN: That’s right. It’s another example. And it’s an important example as to how doctors and nurses have essentially become snitches for the state — not all doctors, but a significant enough number of them that in the state of Alabama they kind of have a hotline relationship with prosecutors in that state. And I know this because I spent time in Alabama interviewing prosecutors, in person and then also by phone, interviewing them as to: How are you coming to prosecute these women in your state connected with their pregnancies? And I was directly told it’s because of the relationships that have been formed and built with nurses and doctors.


And, of course, this is the backdrop of the case involving the dozens of Black women in South Carolina where the Medical University of South Carolina purposefully engaged in creating a dragnet with police and prosecutors so that they could explicitly and specifically target Black women who used crystallized cocaine during pregnancy. Now, for your audience to be clear, there is no statistical difference in terms of the rate of use of crystallized cocaine between Black women and white women at all. But the Medical University of South Carolina wanted to focus only on Black women. And, in fact, in their dragnet, which included dozens of women literally being dragged out of their hospitals or shackled and chained during delivery, there was only one white woman who was implicated in their large and official dragnet. And that was a white woman on whose medical chart one of the head nurses wrote “lives with Negro boyfriend.” And that was enough to get her lumped in with the Black women who were singled out for this kind of chilling and horrific treatment. And all of this is important to know, and all of this we would have seen, if in fact there were broader attention paid to reproductive rights as a plural, rather than as a singular item.


AMY GOODMAN: Professor Goodwin, at the end of your book, you write about a Reproductive Justice New Deal. Can you explain what your recommendations are?


MICHELE GOODWIN: Yes. We have to understand that in these times, nobody is really safe. This is really a backsliding of democracy. This is really a trampling of the rule of law in many ways. And if we had more time on it, we could talk about just how Justice Roberts fits into that. But I write about —


AMY GOODMAN: Please do.


MICHELE GOODWIN: OK. I write about a Reproductive New Deal as the urgency of these times in recognizing that we’re all vulnerable. People who are LGBTQ, as we see in Texas, have become vulnerable; in Florida, the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, which is now sweeping across the country; the attacks on parents and trans children in Texas. In this Reproductive New Deal, I outline that there should be constitutional protections associated with the reproductive sphere, and, in fact, with just simply the human sphere. And I delineate what all of that means, step by step, much in relation to just the kind of arc that we’ve talked about on your show this morning. Across all of these areas, we need to think about protecting people who can become pregnant, and seeing those as fundamental constitutional rights all along. And we don’t have an Equal Rights Amendment. And this is a means of explicitly getting at these various areas in which legislators have sought to basically strip away any form of human dignity, privacy, autonomy and equality from anybody who has the potential to become pregnant. And we are largely talking about women and girls.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Michele Goodwin, chancellor’s professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, author of the book Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood.

LINKS 

Michele Goodwin on Twitter
"I Was Raped by My Father. An Abortion Saved My Life."
Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy
"On the Issues with Michele Goodwin"
"Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood"

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