January 14, 2013
Lynn M. Paltrow, American Journal of Public Health, 2013, Vol. 103, No. 1
Abstract: All pregnant women, not just those who seek to end a pregnancy, have benefited from Roe v Wade. Today’s system of mass incarceration makes it likely that if Roe is overturned women who have abortions will go to jail.
This weekend, National Advocates for Pregnant Women's work and perspectives are featured in the New York Times Magazine. The story, The Criminalization of Bad Mothers, focuses on pregnant drug using women who are being prosecuted under Alabama's Chemical Endangerment Act - a law intended to punish adults who bring children to environments where illegal drugs are being made.
An article in the Globe and Mail, fans the flames of "pill-baby" hysteria. NAPW ally and renowned expert on treating opioid-dependence during pregnancy, Dr. Robert Newman, takes the article to task for its biased portrayal of opioid users and their babies.
August 24, 2011
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Lynn M. Paltrow
NOVA Law Review
Vol 13. No. 2, Spring 1989
August 17, 2011
Lynn M. Paltrow
New York University Review of Law & Social Change
Vol.35, No. 1, 2011
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This article uses the McCorvey v. Hill case to illustrate how the pro-choice movement and traditional lawyering approaches have missed critical opportunities to use attacks on Roe and other anti-abortion cases as a way to build alliances across the range of issues and movements necessary to protect the right to choose abortion, and more fundamentally the personhood of pregnant women.
cross-posted to RH Reality Check
Last week, the Washington Post’s On Faith blog ran a post in its Guest Voices series which posed the question of whether abortion is always morally wrong, and whether “religious conservatives really believe God gives them permission to pretend this world is far simpler than it is.
As NAPW’s newest commentary in RH Reality Check and the Huffington Post makes clear, state laws treating fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses as legally separate from the pregnant women who carry, nurture, and sustain them creates the basis for denying pregnant women their personhood and their right to be treated like other human beings.
In 2008, Amanda K. was six months pregnant and went into early labor with a prolapsed umbilical cord. She went to a local hospital for care where she underwent emergency cesarean surgery to facilitate delivery of her son.
I hope that Amnesty International’s Report, Deadly Delivery The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA, will get extensive coverage. It is a document that talks about "the right to life" as something that applies to pregnant women and new mothers.
March 02, 2010
The following written statement was presented as part of the Universal Periodic Review Consultation process with the U.S. State Department. NAPW has documented numerous cases of severe and often hidden abuses faced by pregnant women.
