Jeanne Flavin is a professor of sociology at Fordham University (NYC, USA) and author of "Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women's Reproduction in America." She grew up on a small family farm in the rural US.

The false, sensationalist narratives about the harms of a pregnant woman’s drug use sown in the United States during the 1980s "crack baby" hysteria continue to bear dangerous fruit, and threaten to choke out policies grounded in science, rights, and compassion. We have documented around 1,800 cases in which people – overwhelmingly women – were arrested and their pregnancy treated as part of a crime, often on the basis of a single positive drug test result (Paltrow & Flavin 2013; Kavattur et al. 2023).

Pregnancy occurs inside one's body; everything a pregnant person does or doesn't do may affect a developing fetus . . . or not. In the small minority of cases claiming actual harm, prosecutors either aren't required or aren't able to produce evidence of a causal link between drug use and the claimed harm. More commonly, they justify policing people who become pregnant based on perceived or manufactured risks, using crimes like “child endangerment” that only require a possibility of harm. Prosecutors claim testing positive is the asserted harm, or that it is simply a matter of time until some harm manifests itself.

Many health care and social workers accept this unbounded “risk of harm” framework and report women to punitive authorities. Feminists and liberal lawmakers are among those who have largely failed to challenge this framework and have sometimes even supported it.

A need exists to eradicate this framework and instead, propagate facts about pregnancy and health that are overlooked when the focus is on drug use. These include: pregnancy poses a risk of harm to the person who is pregnant; it is biologically impossible for any person to guarantee that a pregnancy will result in a healthy newborn; the major drivers of health are social, not individual; and punishment is incompatible with health care.