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A new report has found that, in the years following the Supreme Court’s overturning of abortion rights established in Roe v. Wade, hundreds of people have been charged with crimes related to their pregnancies.
Reproductive rights nonprofit Pregnancy Justice documented at least 902 cases of such charges in the three years after the court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision. The data suggests that more cases likely exist, since the research only covers the period from the summer of 2022 through 2025, and doesn’t include instances where people were charged over the past year.
Most of the charges being brought against pregnant people relate to their actions while pregnant, pregnancy loss, or births, Pregnancy Justice noted in its report. The cases are primarily based on long-existing criminal statutes, not new abortion ban laws, with 876 of the 955 charges documented relating to allegations of child neglect, endangerment, or abuse.
While the report notes that during that three-year period, a majority of the cases were in just three states — South Carolina (381 cases), Oklahoma (222), and Alabama (204).
that individuals were abusing drugs or other substances during their pregnancies; failed to provide an adequate amount of prenatal care for their fetus or infant; and attempted to obtain, obtained, or even merely researched abortion services.
What’s more, prosecutors overwhelmingly charged pregnant people under statutes that allow them to obtain convictions without proving that there was any actual harm to a fetus or infant. According to the report, close to 95 percent of the cases involved such charges.
“These numbers show that the criminalization of pregnancy in this country is not some distant or hypothetical consequence of abortion bans,” said Lourdes A. Rivera, president of Pregnancy Justice. “It is already happening.”
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Rivera added:
Law enforcement is using laws that were never intended to apply to pregnancy to investigate, arrest, and punish women, and it’s only getting worse since the overturning of Roe. Pregnant people deserve health care, support, and dignity — not handcuffs.
Beyond criminal charges that pregnant people have faced, abortion bans and other restrictions on reproductive health care have also led to deadly outcomes in the years since the Dobbs decision.
A ProPublica report from last month, for example, found around 200 documented instances of people dying from ectopic pregnancies from 2020-2025 — a rate that is about double what it had been in the preceding six-year period.
The report noted that doctors, perhaps concerned that their action could be viewed as illegal by their state governments, may be hesitating to offer treatment when an ectopic pregnancy occurs. Such pregnancies, in which a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, often in a fallopian tube, are in no way viable and can often lead to life-threatening complications.
In an op-ed for Truthout in the spring of 2025, Lauren Rankin, reproductive rights author and journalist, wrote: “Under abortion bans, the life of the pregnant person is a secondary concern.”
“Doctors are afraid of being prosecuted for treating a potentially life-threatening health issue; someone facing a miscarriage is afraid of being prosecuted for flushing the toilet; and a teenager and her mother were imprisoned because she didn’t know where else to turn for an abortion in her state,” Rankin said, discussing real-life examples of how abortion restrictions have detrimentally affected people’s lives.
“This isn’t an accident, but an intentional byproduct of overturning Roe and ending the constitutional right to an abortion,” Rankin added. “Ending Roe was meant to ripple far beyond abortion — it was meant to erode the personhood of pregnant people, to eradicate their full-fledged autonomy and ability to determine the course of their own lives. When you reduce someone to less than a person in the eyes of the state, criminalization is never far behind.”
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