The Crime of “Neglecting” a Fetus
  October 22, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, Calling all movie lovers for a gathering of The Meteor’s Book and Sometimes Movie Club! Next month we are gathering to discuss Nathan Fielder’s documentary “You Can See Everything” and all of the everythings that merit a conversation, from Elizabeth Holmes’ motherhood to the Amanda Seyfried of it all. Care to join us? Click the button below for more details. In today’s newsletter, we dive into the disturbing findings of a new report on pregnancy criminalization. Plus, several essential women’s sports updates. Getting the big popcorn, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONThe “floodgates” of pregnancy criminalization: This week, Pregnancy Justice released a study on the status of pregnancy criminalization in the first three years post-Dobbs—and the numbers are bleak. They found that from 2022 to 2025, prosecutors initiated at least 902 cases nationwide charging people with crimes related to their pregnancies or pregnancy outcomes. (For scale, 1,809 such cases were documented by Pregnancy Justice in the entire 50 years that Roe v. Wade was the law of the land.) Since Dobbs was decided, “charges in connection with pregnancy loss are accelerating,” explains Pregnancy Justice’s senior vice-president Dana Sussman—an outcome that’s “unsurprising given that we have…criminalized the provision of abortion.” But most of these pregnancy criminalization cases don’t hinge on anti-abortion laws at all. Instead, boosted by fetal personhood laws, prosecutors are using child abuse, neglect, and endangerment statutes to charge pregnant people with crimes. Here are three of the most shocking and enraging findings from the report. Most of these charges come from just three states.In total, prosecutors in 23 states initiated the study’s documented cases against pregnant people. But of the 902 cases, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Alabama accounted for 807 of them. Sussman attributes these numbers to fetal personhood laws. She explains that those states’ supreme courts “issued decisions stating that a fetus is a child under the state’s criminal laws. In the case of Alabama, they said an embryo is also considered a child, and that has opened the floodgates.” Most fetal personhood laws predate the Dobbs decision, but Sussman notes that without Roe, “the guardrails are essentially off.” Since 2022, prosecutors have been casting a wider net to ensnare pregnant women regardless of their pregnancy outcome (i.e. a live birth, a loss, or an infant death).  (SCREENSHOT VIA PREGNANCY JUSTICE) Prosecutors don’t need any proof of harm to bring charges.An overwhelming number of the charges brought against pregnant people involved statutes that did not require proof of harm but instead rely on showing a risk of harm in order to convict. For example, neglect was among one of the most common charges, which does not require proof that harm was done to the child in the same way that an abuse or manslaughter charge would. In states with fetal personhood laws, prosecutors are applying laws meant to protect children to fetuses in utero. Law enforcement does “not need to show that the baby is unhealthy, [that] the baby was harmed in any way by the mother, or that the pregnancy was put at risk in any way,” Sussman says. “All they need to show is that the mother’s behavior exposed the fetus to some risk of harm.” And what that means in the “vast majority” of these cases, Sussman says, is “exposure to substances.” If a pregnant person tests positive for any illicit substance throughout pregnancy or delivery, “that’s all you need to charge the woman and convict her of child neglect in some of these states. And those charges carry a potential life sentence in places like Oklahoma.” Such a heavy sentence is part of the reason prosecutors pursue these statutes: They require less effort to prosecute but yield high results. “It’s the lowest-hanging fruit,” Sussman says. Even lack of prenatal care can be considered neglect.Perhaps the most shocking finding of the report was that, in at least 77 of the cases observed, prosecutors or police argued that “failure to obtain prenatal care was evidence of a crime”—despite the fact that more than one in three U.S. counties are maternal care deserts. While it’s rare to prosecute solely on a charge of neglect via lack of prenatal care, there have been criminal cases in the last three years where that charge was brought up as an aggravating factor in a case. (Nevermind that the fear of criminalization itself often discourages pregnant women from visiting the doctor.) One last thing to keep in mind: Some people’s pregnancies are criminalized far more than others’; nearly three-quarters of the cases in the study involved low-income pregnant people. Another necessary reminder that the government may hate women, but it really hates poor women. AND:
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