When Pregnancy Is the Crime: An exit interview with Lynn Paltrow, who has spent decades representing women jailed for miscarriages and stillbirths.
New York Magazine, June 6, 2023: When Pregnancy Is the Crime: An exit interview with Lynn Paltrow, who has spent decades representing women jailed for miscarriages and stillbirths.
“At a single table in Manhattan last Wednesday sat Chelsea Becker, who was charged with murder and jailed for more than a year after prosecutors blamed her stillbirth on methamphetamine use; Rinat Dray, who has spent much of the past decade suing Staten Island University Hospital for, according to its own notes, ‘overriding her refusal’ to have a Cesarean birth; Tammy Loertscher, who was jailed and whose fetus was assigned an attorney by the state of Wisconsin after she disclosed past drug use to doctors; and Julie Burkhart, who operates abortion clinics in Wyoming and Illinois, having previously done so in Kansas and Oklahoma.
“They had come together to salute Lynn Paltrow, who had just stepped down from the leadership of the recently renamed Pregnancy Justice, which she founded as the National Advocates for Pregnant Women more than two decades ago. (‘Pregnancy Justice is much shorter and hopefully more memorable,’ she said.) Though primarily a legal advocacy group, it describes its mission as working ‘to ensure that no one loses their rights because of pregnancy or because of their capacity for pregnancy, focusing on pregnant people who are most at risk of state control and criminalization: those who are low-income, of color, and drug-using.’ Paltrow, who got her start in mainstream reproductive-rights groups, opened her own shop, still a relatively small and scrappy group with outsize influence, because, she said that night, ‘I could not think of any other way that I would be able to carry out the work that didn’t fit.’ She’s now ready to pass the torch.
“At the podium, Becker remembered being held on a $5 million bail she had no way of paying, then receiving a letter from Paltrow and her team. ‘It said, “We want to help you and we will not charge you for this help. Write back if you want us to help you.”’ Paltrow, she said, was more than just the lawyer who helped get those murder charges dismissed; she’d encouraged Becker on her path to sobriety and to community college and had never forgotten Becker’s birthday. She pointed out it was Paltrow’s 65th birthday that day. Burkhart recalled that after an anti-abortion activist murdered her former boss, abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, in church, Paltrow dropped everything to come to Wichita and be at her side. Onscreen, reproductive-justice legend Dorothy Roberts called Paltrow ‘perhaps my longest ally in the fight for reproductive justice,’ and onstage, SisterSong executive director Monica Raye Simpson sang part of a song she wrote: ‘We’ve got to keep on pushing. We’ve got to feel the fire deep within.’”
Additional reading:
Ms., May 17, 2023: A Pioneer in the Fight for Pregnancy Justice: The Ms. Q&A With Lynn Paltrow
