A New Feminist Approach to the Law of Pregnancy

DECEMBER 22, 2023

BY JENNIFER HENDRICKS

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and abolished the right to abortion, the court trivialized pregnancy and its impact on women’s lives. Nowhere in its opinion did the court discuss the physical burdens and risks of gestation and childbirth. Instead, the court suggested that women should be forced to carry pregnancies to term in order to increase the “domestic supply” of adoptable infants.

This trivialization of pregnancy is not new: it pervades the law of pregnancy. My new book, Essentially a Mother, shows how courts and legislators have been downgrading the importance of gestation and childbirth for decades. Pregnant people have not only lost their right to bodily autonomy, they have lost the law’s respect for their relationships with the children they create. In addition to abortion, the book discusses cases like these:

After a long struggle with infertility, Mina Kim at last had a successful course of in vitro fertilization and became pregnant with twins. But shortly after their birth, a court took them away and placed them in two separate homes—not because Mina had abused or neglected them but because the fertility clinic she used for her IVF had made a mistake. Instead of the embryos made from Mina’s eggs and her husband’s sperm, the clinic had given her embryos that came from two other couples. In the eyes of the law, she was not the boys’ mother, only a surrogate, albeit an involuntary one.

Haley Thornton was one of the few: a fourteen-year-old girl who reported her rape, testified against her rapist, and saw him convicted of the crime. But after she gave birth to a child conceived from the rape, her rapist sued her for paternity rights. The courts held that because he was genetically the child’s father, he had the same rights as any other father, including the right to seek full or partial custody of the child. Haley would thus be tethered to her rapist as her co-parent for the next eighteen years.

More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/22/a-new-feminist-approach-to-the-law-of-pregnancy/