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 womens 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 laws 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 homesnot 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 Minas eggs and her husbands 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 childs 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/