Townhall
The New Republic
How Substance Use Became a Trojan Horse to Undermine Abortion Rights
Left
In the first two years of post-Dobbs America, 412 people were charged with “pregnancy-related” crimes, with 399 of these being related to substance use—including alcohol. These charges, which most frequently alleged either child abuse or neglect of the fetus, were made possible by politicians who have slow-dripped the language and ideology of fetal personhood into lawmaking for decades, a process that has only amplified since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. For years, anti-choice lawmakers have sought to lay down legal precedents for fetuses and embryos to be considered fully fledged persons in need of legal protections as part of a wider framework to criminalize abortion as murder. But this language and this broader approach to so-called public health have ramifications beyond abortion: If a fetus is a person, then consuming alcohol or narcotics while pregnant and putting the fetus at risk for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or FASD, and other substance-related birth defects is a form of child endangerment.Not only does this result in the criminalizing of pregnant people, it also hinders the prevention, research, and treatment for both the FASD and substance use disorders being weaponized to advance this anti-abortion agenda. What’s more, this ideology has proven to be wholly ineffective in the effort to “protect fetuses.” Laws around “pregnancy-related crimes” have only prevented mothers from seeking support, while simultaneously creating legal frameworks for restricting abortion access, creating a climate where pregnant patients are increasingly policed and where public health policies around prenatal substance exposure, FASD, and reproductive justice movements are increasingly linked.Dr. Sarah Roberts is a professor and legal epidemiologist at the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health initiative at the University of California at San Francisco, and one of the only researchers in the United States working on the intersections of health care practices and policies around abortion and the criminalization of behaviors while pregnant. “Singling out drinking while pregnant isn’t effective,” she explains, noting that none of the punitive or so-called “supportive” FASD prevention policies that she’s analyzed actually prevented FASD.The only policies that actually prevented FASD and offered support to mothers and babies with FASD were those that addressed alcohol consumption across the board. “People who are drinking while pregnant were drinking before they got pregnant and are in families and communities where people are drinking as well, so by reducing drinking at a population level, that also relates to improved outcomes during pregnancy,” Dr. Roberts explains.In her research, Dr. Roberts has found that the states that criminalize pregnant people consuming alcohol largely overlap with states restricting abortion.“Anti-abortion laws have always opened up the potential for greater surveillance, policing, and punishment of pregnant people. We see that in the way that miscarriage is policed, the way that substance use during pregnancy is increasingly policed, in the way that people have been punished for this, under a range of laws that have nothing to do with abortion,” explains Dr. Gretchen Sisson, sociologist at the University of California at San Francisco, and the author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.As Roberts explains, many of the policies that target pregnant people who drink also target those who consume other substances. These policies have deep roots, often dating back to the “war on drugs,” and, more specifically, the racist “crack baby” scare in the 1980s and 1990s. Media outlets of that era often presented sensationalist narratives that babies born to mothers using crack cocaine would be born with brain damage and overwhelm welfare systems, leading to a widespread targeting and policing of Black pregnant people, in particular. These policies were often ignored or brushed aside by mainstream pro-choice, often white-led organizing groups at the time, without the foresight of recognizing that this very same positioning of fetuses as people would be used to dismantle abortion access in the years to come. “There is a racist history to this, an ableist history to this, and a classist history to this, that these issues weren’t considered ‘mainstream’ abortion rights or reproductive rights issues,” explains Dana Sussman, the vice president of Pregnancy Justice.Today, Roberts’s research has found that Black mothers are still excessively targeted by “total welfare reporting,” or laws that require physicians to report pregnant patients to Child Protective Services if alcohol consumption is suspected. This reporting is linked to an increase in adverse effects for Black women and babies, despite the “pro-family” rhetoric behind them.
