Policing Black Bodies by Angela J. Hattery

Author:Angela J. Hattery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Criminalization of Pregnancy

Girls and women have been subjected to the sexual policing of their bodies since the beginning of time, and there is no evidence, in the United States or globally, that this will end anytime soon. Consistently, across the twenty-five or thirty years in which statistical data have been collected on crimes of sexual and intimate partner violence, about half of all women living in the United States have been or will be a victim of some sort of sexual or intimate partner violence in her lifetime. And, not surprisingly, the rates are higher for Black women, as our own interviews confirmed.

One of the more recent strategies for policing Black women’s bodies is what we term the criminalization of pregnancy. The criminalization of pregnancy is a movement in state legislatures and the criminal justice system more widely whereby women who engage in behaviors that “harm” the fetus they are carrying are increasingly being charged with crimes. The most common scenario involves women who use drugs or abuse alcohol while they are pregnant and who are charged with child endangerment or, worse yet, if the fetus is born dead, with fetal homicide.

In her influential 1997 book, Killing the Black Body, Dorothy Roberts devotes an entire chapter to interrogating the criminalization of pregnancy in which she details not only the cases but, more important, the laws that are used to prosecute and ultimately to imprison women for their behavior while pregnant. According to Roberts, the first cases of prosecuting women for endangering their babies through their behavior while pregnant took place in the early 1990s. At that time the primary focus of the prosecutions was on poor Black women who gave birth to crack babies. Roberts argues persuasively that this movement began as an attempt to deal with what many in the public perceived as an “explosion of crack babies.” Dorothy Roberts recounts the case of twenty-eight-year-old Cornelia Whitner who in February 1992 gave birth to a healthy baby. Upon conducting a urine test on the baby, traces of crack were discovered. The baby was healthy, and in her court hearing Whitner begged to be sentenced to a residential treatment program in order to address her addiction and become a good parent. The judge responded, “I think I’ll just let her to go to jail.” He sentenced her to a startling eight-year sentence.[4]

These laws, called “fetal harm laws,” are controversial but also compelling for those who believe that criminalizing women’s behavior is a solution to drug problems. Instead, what Roberts and others note is that these laws end up forcing women to make difficult choices about their reproductive lives. Women can choose to continue with their pregnancies and risk going to prison—often for very long sentences—or they can “choose” to have an abortion, which will limit their prosecution to drug possession, allowing them to escape the more rigorous charge of child endangerment. We wonder what kind of a choice this is.

Additionally, the criminalization of pregnancy, because of its focus on drug

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