Constructing Immorality: Abortion and Family Policing

This article was written by Jasmine Wali and published in the CUNY Law Review.

This article investigates the relationship between abortion criminalization and family policing in a post-Roe landscape.

“An influx of children into the foster system resulting from Dobbs will more likely be due to forced birth causing poverty and the criminalization of poverty by the family policing system. Assumptions that banning abortions will lead to increased child abuse repeats 1970s-era rhetoric that there is an inherent pathology and criminality among Black parents who are too poor to access reproductive healthcare, and strengthens the arguments for unconstitutional state investigations and intervention. “