Imagine going to the emergency room with bleeding in early pregnancy. You might be having a miscarriage, you might have taken pills online to self-manage your abortion since that care might not be legal where you live. Either way, your symptoms and story could be similar. Your care team, suspicious of your bleeding, calls the police. The next thing you know, you’re answering questions about your behavior and whether you caused your pregnancy loss. Worst case scenario, you find yourself arrested and charged with a crime. All for trying to get healthcare. All for placing your trust in the very institution and people who should be caring for and protecting you.
In our most recent episode we were lucky enough to speak with brilliant legal expert and law professor from Rutgers, Kim Mutcherson. She is an expert when it comes to reproductive health law, specifically criminalization of reproductive care. As we’ve been learning in this post-Dobbs landscape, lawyers have a lot to teach doctors. We cover a lot of territory in this interview, including disparities in criminalization, provider ethics, and what gives us hope.
Check out the episode where you find your podcasts!
Want to take a deeper dive into this topic? Check out the amazing work from Pregnancy Justice - including this webinar from the Fall of 2025 entitled Policing Pregnancy: Pregnancy Criminalization in the First Two Years After Dobbs. The data center on the Pregnancy Justice website has a ton of information about criminalization post-Dobbs, including how medical professionals are often the ones to contact the authorities and report their patients.
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