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Goodwin, Michele. 2020. Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of 
Motherhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN: 9781139343244 
 
While the frenzied calls of Trump rally goers during the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns to 

jail Hilary Clinton – “lock her up, lock her up!” – was never more than a perverse form of catharsis, 

the passage of so-called fetal protection laws throughout the United States in the last two decades 

really has resulted in the incarceration of hundreds of women, especially indigent women of color. 

At present, at least thirty-eight states have such laws, and while some state laws were originally 

intended to protect pregnant women – who are at higher risk of domestic violence – such laws are 

increasingly used to prosecute rather than protect them. Indeed, between 2006 and 2020, according 

to the Center for Public Integrity’s websitei, more than 1,300 women have either been prosecuted 

for fetal crimes or have been subject to involuntary medical interventions. Of these, most are in 

the South and nearly one-half have occurred in Alabama alone.   

Two trends, as Goodwin shows, undergird the expansion of these laws. The first is the tendency 

to treat fetuses and even embryos as children. This is best exemplified by a recent Georgia adoption 

law that declares that embryos have “rights and responsibilities” under state law. The second is the 

tendency to assume that a woman has complete control over the outcome of a pregnancy, or, as 

one South Carolina court held, “absent depraved conduct on the part of pregnant women, stillbirths 

do not occur and that all pregnancies produce healthy babies (42)”. While the first tendency is 

rooted in religious dogma or belief, and, therefore, cannot be disproven, the second one clearly can 

be as there are many medical, social and environmental causes that can and do lead to miscarriage, 

and many cases in which this outcome cannot be determined.  

A major of focus of Policing the Womb is on the impact that fetal protection laws have on the 

fiduciary relationship between patients and their doctors or other health care providers. Thanks to 

TV court dramas, most Americans are likely aware that communication between lawyers and their 



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clients is scrupulously protected; lawyers are even prevented from revealing information about 

illegal activities that their clients are involved in without their clients’ consent. A similar 

relationship historically exists between doctors and their patients regarding the release of medical 

information; however, as Goodwin notes, pregnant women living in the South – particularly poor, 

women of color – are increasingly at risk of arrest if a toxicology report reveals that they have 

illicit substances in their bodies. Such was the case in South Carolina where dozens of Black 

women responded to an advertisement for free prenatal care at the Medical University of South 

Carolina, which, as the medical director later acknowledged, was little more than a sting operation. 

Carrying the comparison further, the Goodwin argues that while police receive legal training and 

would be required to obtain permission from a judge to search a home, medical personnel have no 

training in constitutional law, and need not apply to a neutral, third party to conduct a search of 

the body or give the results of the search to law enforcement. 

While the South Carolina legislature, the district attorney and the MUSC might be directly to 

blame, Goodwin is also very critical of organizations like Planned Parenthood whose singular 

focus on abortion has not only led them to ignore the proliferation of “fetal protection laws,” but 

also the cases like Captain Susan Struck who became pregnant while stationed in Vietnam and was 

told either to terminate her pregnancy or leave the base within 48 hours. When Struck, an observant 

Catholic, refused to have an abortion, she was discharged from the military, a decision she 

appealed unsuccessfully on seven occasions. In this vein, Goodwin argues for a broader 

perspective on reproductive rights that includes: contraception (as well as protection against 

involuntary sterilization), pregnancy screening, testing and treatment of sexually transmitted 

diseases, pre-natal care, “and, of course, the equally important right to maintain or terminate a 

pregnancy” (13).   

Policing the Womb also discusses somewhat better known topics such as the South’s dismal 

maternal health outcomes, and institutional violence in the U.S healthcare system more generally. 

For example, in contrast to the pregnant South Carolina women described above, Goodwin notes 

that notwithstanding the fact that white women use prescription drugs during pregnancy at a higher 

rate than Black women – including certain pharmaceuticals that might harm a developing fetus – 

they face no similar risks of arrest or incarceration. A similar contrast can be drawn between the 

moral and media panic surrounding crack babies born to Black mothers in the 1980s, and the much 

more muted response to women (more frequently Caucasian) who smoke or consume alcohol 



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during pregnancy despite the fact that alcohol poisoning causes serious and permanent 

neurological damage to babies in utero whereas the effects of crack are inconclusive at best.ii   

While no reader, certainly no anthropologist, will mistake Policing the Womb for an ethnographic 

study, Goodwin does punctuate this timely study with moving, albeit brief, descriptions of women 

who’ve been victimized by these new and recently revised laws. Perhaps, the most poignant – 

certainly the most gruesome – of these is the case of Marlise Muñoz, a thirty-three old women who 

collapsed and died after a blood clot entered her lungs. However because Munoz was fourteen 

weeks pregnant at the time, and a resident of Texas, neither her advanced directives nor her 

family’s desire that she die with dignity were honored. Indeed, her brain dead, body was tethered 

to medical “life support” equipment for 62 days to permit a fetus -- with hydrocephalus and other 

serious fetal abnormalities – to gestate. Only after a state judge ruled that the Texas fetal protection 

law did not apply to Muñoz because she was dead, did this extraordinary intervention come to an 

end.  

There are a couple places in the book where readers may feel that Goodwin gets down in the legal 

weeds or is writing strictly for lawyers. One is the discussion of Gidulig v. Aiello, a case in which 

four pregnant women sued the State of California’s disability insurance program when they were 

denied coverage. The prevailing view among feminist legal scholars is that the decision by 

SCOTUS to provide a pregnancy exception to the insurance program meant the court rejected the 

application of the equal protection clause to pregnancy. However, based on a complex analysis of 

Justice Potter Steward’s footnotes and Justice Brennan’s dissent, Goodwin argues in favor of much 

narrower view of the decision with the aim of showing how a sex equality agenda might still be 

constructed out of existing judicial decisions. Such ventures into complex legal analysis, however, 

are few and quite far beyond between. Some readers, though, may choose to skip Chapter 10. 

In short, Policing the Womb is an impressive, scholarly, yet very readable, study which draws on 

more than two hundred court cases, statutes, legal briefs, and legislative and government reports 

as well as an impressive list of scholarly books and articles which span medicine, health policy, 

law and the social sciences. It also draws on hundreds of newspaper articles, films and other media 

sources. While I plan to use it for an upper division medical anthropology course that I’ve been 

teaching for the last seventeen years, I think it would also be suitable for courses on health policy 

and law, women and gender studies, and ethics.  



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Ronald Loewe 

Professor of Anthropology, CSULB 
December 27, 2022 

 
i https://publicintegrity.org/inside-publici/newsletters/watchdog-newsletter/pregnancy-loss-crime-reproductive-
rights/  
ii https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4180095/ 
 
 
 

 

© 2023 Ronald Loewe 


