Exciting News!!
Personhood, a feature documentary film, has been awarded the American Bar Association's 2020 Silver Gavel Award for Media and the Arts. PERSONHOOD focuses on the case of Tamara Loertscher, who brought a federal lawsuit challenging Wisconsin’s Unborn Child Protection Act (Act 292) with Pregnancy Justice, the NYU School of Law Reproductive Justice Clinic, and Perkins-Coie as her lawyers.
The New York Times Series " A Woman's Rights"
March 11, 2019
The New York Times Editorial Board published the groundbreaking series "A Woman's Rights" on December 28, 2018. Please find the entire series here.
You can read each part of the series and download individual PDFs below:
Download Intro: A Woman's Rights
Download Part 1: When Prosecutors Jail a Mother for a Miscarriage
Download Part 2: The Feticide Playbook, Explained
Download Part 3: The Cost of Complacency About Roe
Download Part 4: Slandering the Unborn
Download Part 5: The Mothers Society Condemns
Download Part 6: Can a Corpse Give Birth?
Download Part 7: How My Stillbirth Became a Crime
Download Part 8: The Future of Personhood Nation
We want to share a video we made about Tammy Loertscher's experience challenging Wisconsin Act 292. We ask that you share her story with your social media community. We need her voice to be heard.
Under this law, the government can, in the context of secret juvenile court proceedings, take certain pregnant women into custody, appoint a lawyer for her embryo or fetus, and lock the woman up in a drug treatment program, mental hospital or jail based on evidence of pregnancy and current (or even past) use of any amount of alcohol or a controlled substance.
June 18, 2018 - Today a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit vacated a well-reasoned decision by a federal district court that had struck down Wisconsin's Unborn Child Protection Act (Act 292) as unconstitutional. The appeals court panel avoided grappling with Act 292's numerous constitutional problems by ruling that the woman challenging it, Tamara Loertscher, could not continue to do so because she had moved out of Wisconsin.
Earlier this year, the Federal District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin struck down Act 292 (also known as the "Unborn Child Protection" Act)--a law that permits detention, incarceration, and forced medical interventions on pregnant women--as unconstitutionally vague.
In July 2017, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a report criticizing the detention of pregnant women in the United States and highlighting the harsh Wisconsin law Pregnancy Justice and our allies have been working to defeat.
The Wisconsin Medical Association, American Medical Association and other leading medical groups, as well as Amnesty International and other international human rights groups, and the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel are all supporting Pregnancy Justice’s litigation opposing Wisconsin Act 292, a law that permits detention, incarceration, and forced medical interventions on pregnant women.
New York, May 18, 2017—Three weeks ago, the federal court struck down a Wisconsin law authorizing the detention, forced treatment, and incarceration of pregnant women as unconstitutional. The law allowed the state to seize control of women, detain them in jail or other locked facilities, and force them to submit to unconsented to and inappropriate treatment if they are pregnant and use – or even disclose past use of – any amount of alcohol or a controlled substance.
On Friday evening, April 28, 2017, a federal court in Wisconsin struck down a state law authorizing the detention, forced treatment, and incarceration of pregnant women as unconstitutional.
