11 - Conclusion

Summary

Understanding the enigmatic policing of pregnant women requires grappling with broader, troubling social and political issues, including mass incarceration, the U.S. drug war, welfare reform, and even our nation’s notorious, but largely hidden, history of eugenics. These policy landmines set the stage for regarding pregnant women as objects of the state, deploying criminal punishment as a viable means of regulating their behavior, and, in essence and substance, criminalizing pregnancy. This book makes a close study of those issues and reveals that fetal protection efforts, which are often purported to justify states’ persistent intrusions in poor women’s lives, serve to mask other politically expedient interests: controlling women and demanding their obedience, gerrymandering, pandering to tough-on-crime strategies, achieving electoral victories, and heightening moral panic. Rarely are the well-being and dignity of babies and children a persistent concern of those politicians who most favor punitive interventions in the lives of their mothers. In the process of writing this book, I have come to conclude that criminal threats and prosecution are measuring pregnant women’s obedience, and far more than fetal risk. After all, how are shackling, birthing in prison toilets, and rearing children behind bars demonstrative of respect for fetal or child life?