People are being imprisoned for the crime of having a miscarriage now.

That’s right! It wasn’t enough to criminalize abortion. It wasn’t enough to force thousands of people to carry life-threatening or unwanted pregnancies. It wasn’t enough to strip away the bodily autonomy and fundamental human rights of half the population. It wasn’t enough to enforce incredible punitive action against those who get abortions anyways, with some bills advocating for the death penalty. Now they’re also criminalizing something that is, for many people, an incredibly personal experience rife with grief, guilt, and trauma. Miscarriages can be sudden, terrifying, and are often inexplicable. For those who are genuinely trying for a child, it is a heartbreaking loss. The remains of the fetus are often dealt with privately, as is the grief.

And now the state is punishing people for that. Specifically, how the remains are dealt with. Numerous women have been arrested and brought to court for abuse of a corpse, with the alleged ‘abuses’ varying from flushing the remains, disposing of it in the trash, or burying it. That last one always gets me. They buried it. How are you supposed to handle the remains correctly if BURYING IT isn’t enough???

But that’s the thing. Nothing is enough, because the goal isn’t to create legal guidelines for the handling of fetal remains. What they’re trying to do is set a precedent for fetuses being treated as full, living, legal humans with rights. Not only that, but rights that override those of the parent.

This is idiotic from a number of standpoints. For one, fetuses are very obviously not people. Anti-abortion activists love to pretend that abortions are prying fully developed babies out of the womb, but the tissue that’s actually removed during an abortion can usually fit on a petri dish and looks a lot closer to a mold than a human. They also aren’t legally people, since they aren’t legally alive and, you know, have not been born.

And even if they were to be considered people, logically speaking, that might validate recent lawsuits but would not validate the criminalization of abortion. Parents are not legally required to donate organs to their real, living children, nor are they legally required to undergo medical treatments or endure conditions that may threaten their lives. Under the schema proposed by fetal personhood, the fetus’s supposed right to birth overrides the parent’s right to bodily autonomy or even their right to live. And with criminalization, it contextualizes the parent’s rights and personhood—because in America, criminalization is the number one method of dehumanization—as dependent on their ability to bear a child.

This is unacceptable, and makes clear the true goal of proponents of fetal personhood: to rabidly and without nuance punish women they deem lacking for failing to carry a pregnancy to term. The reason for doing so doesn’t matter. They will target anyone and everyone. If it was an abortion—well, if fetuses are people, then you just committed a real, true-blue murder. And if it was a miscarriage, negligent homicide. Clearly, you weren’t taking good enough care of yourself—of course, that’s if they believe you actually had a miscarriage. 

That’s if they even care to distinguish, which Ashley C. Sawyer, senior policy counsel for reproductive justice organization Pregnancy Justice finds unlikely. Sawyer was quoted by Salon, arguing that the lawmakers authoring bills using the language of fetal personhood “are at least positioning their states to put people in jail and potentially prison for their birth outcomes, whether it is a miscarriage, a stillbirth or an abortion.” 

So, as I said. They’re criminalizing miscarriages now.

I would like to make something crystal clear. I believe that abortion should be legal, no questions, context, or reason needed, not just because requirements provide often insurmountable barriers to care, but because no one should have to fulfill a quota of suffering to receive medical care. I believe that every person with a womb is no less human than those without, and is equally entitled to the right of bodily autonomy. I believe that those who voluntarily end their pregnancies deserve the same human respect as those whose pregnancies ended involuntarily.

But there is something universally and undeniably heinous about the criminalization of miscarriages. This is not something that I can understand anyone with a single shred of human compassion or basic decency arguing for. It is unquestionably grotesque, and should be seen as such no matter where you fall on the political spectrum.

To explain this, let’s speak in extremes. Imagine a parent who was overjoyed to discover their pregnancy. Someone who picked out a name, someone who decorated a nursery, someone who was among the only group of people that I think is reasonable in viewing a fetus as a person—those who genuinely want their pregnancy.

Punishing someone like that for miscarrying—someone who would already be going through incredible, incalculable grief—is nothing short of vile. It is disgusting, it is unjust, and if miscarriages in any form and for any reason are criminalized, it will happen.

It would happen even if these laws were written with the intent to avoid such a thing, and it will most definitely occur seeing as they were born out of a hunger for unrestrained punitive action. Under the rhetoric of fetal personhood, these parents will be offered not compassion but suspicion, stigma, and criminal sentences. Fetal personhood is a disgusting idea that was born purely out of a desire for punitive action against people that the Republican party has deemed inhuman for the crime of not bearing children, and it cannot be allowed to stand.