Aug 17, 2026 · 38 min · 9 segments
In this episode of LawPod UK, Lucy McCann is joined by Professor Valena Beety, legal scholar, innocence litigator and former federal prosecutor, to discuss her new book *Pink Crime*. Professor Beety…
And one of the other contexts in which we see this decision having quite significant implications is during pregnancy in states where now there are restrictive laws on abortion.
And in your book, you discuss kind of tragic cases where people suffer stillbirths or miscarriages.
And even before the decision in Dobbs, there are cases where, of course, blame is put on the pregnant person, and in lots of the cases you look at, they are women of color and poor women of color from specific backgrounds who seem to be targeted.
You look at those cases where actually there are kind of spurious allegations against those women for causing the death of their baby in utero, and you talk about the implications that the Dobbs decision has on this subset of cases.
Well, now that abortion is illegal in a number of states in the United States, that means that some police, and some politicians are encouraging this as well, are investigating women who have miscarriages for whether they actually had an abortion instead, which would be illegal.
So we've seen a ramp up since Dobbs in investigating these women who have miscarriages to see if they have violated the law.
It's interesting because initially the argument behind criminalizing abortion was, "We're not going to go after the pregnant people.
We just want to make sure these babies are not aborted." They would say babies.
But no, we've seen in the past few years, which is one of the reasons I wrote the book, this real pivot towards we are punishing these women as well, because it's about controlling their behavior as well.
It's about controlling gender performance, gender identity, and women more broadly, and we're seeing that sentiment at the highest levels of our federal government and at high levels in our state governments.
So police are investigating miscarriages as abortion, and then prosecutors are bringing charges of murder for stillbirths.
Stillbirths are very difficult to prove scientifically with a medical examiner that a child was born alive and then murdered, and in fact, a number of these cases have relied on a test from hundreds of years ago.
It's called the floating lung test, where the medical examiner will take a piece of lung from the fetus, from the newborn, and if the piece of lung floats, then that means the child was born, the child took its first breath, and then was affirmatively murdered, then was killed.
The problem is this test is notoriously unreliable, and it also gives false positives, so it's more likely for the lung to float, which then that becomes your criminal evidence to use against a woman who had a stillbirth and to say, "You murdered your newborn." So it's an absolute tragedy that we have these women who have lost a newborn, have given birth, and stillbirths are more common in the United States than we acknowledge.
I believe it's one in 150, and miscarriages are up to one in four, and again, these are generally genetic issues.
It's not anything that a woman could control, and yet you have that tragedy, and then you're criminally charged for it as well.
I was really shocked reading your discussion of the floating lung test, and it seemed particularly shocking how many cases are predicated on appallingly poor evidence and, in particular, poor scientific and medical evidence, not just in terms of these stillbirth and miscarriage cases, but across all of the themes that you look at.
And I'm quite surprised how many cases can progress within the American criminal justice system based on such shoddy science.
I can't imagine it happening in the same way in the system in the UK, particularly where because of the adversarial system and both parties having, uh, usually a right to rely on their own evidence, I think that means that there is a good pressure to make sure that you've got a very robust set of evidence to bring your case, obviously not in a criminal context, but in civil context in the UK.
Well, and even in the US, so if I'm bringing a civil case, if it's a civil case about money damages between two parties instead of a criminal case, there are high expectations for scientific evidence, and a lot of scientific evidence is excluded.
And one of the other contexts in which we see this decision having quite significant implications is during pregnancy in states where now there are restrictive laws on abortion.
And in your book, you discuss kind of tragic cases where people suffer stillbirths or miscarriages.
And even before the decision in Dobbs, there are cases where, of course, blame is put on the pregnant person, and in lots of the cases you look at, they are women of color and poor women of color from specific backgrounds who seem to be targeted.
You look at those cases where actually there are kind of spurious allegations against those women for causing the death of their baby in utero, and you talk about the implications that the Dobbs decision has on this subset of cases.
Well, now that abortion is illegal in a number of states in the United States, that means that some police, and some politicians are encouraging this as well, are investigating women who have miscarriages for whether they actually had an abortion instead, which would be illegal.
So we've seen a ramp up since Dobbs in investigating these women who have miscarriages to see if they have violated the law.
It's interesting because initially the argument behind criminalizing abortion was, "We're not going to go after the pregnant people.
We just want to make sure these babies are not aborted." They would say babies.
But no, we've seen in the past few years, which is one of the reasons I wrote the book, this real pivot towards we are punishing these women as well, because it's about controlling their behavior as well.
It's about controlling gender performance, gender identity, and women more broadly, and we're seeing that sentiment at the highest levels of our federal government and at high levels in our state governments.
So police are investigating miscarriages as abortion, and then prosecutors are bringing charges of murder for stillbirths.
Stillbirths are very difficult to prove scientifically with a medical examiner that a child was born alive and then murdered, and in fact, a number of these cases have relied on a test from hundreds of years ago.
It's called the floating lung test, where the medical examiner will take a piece of lung from the fetus, from the newborn, and if the piece of lung floats, then that means the child was born, the child took its first breath, and then was affirmatively murdered, then was killed.
The problem is this test is notoriously unreliable, and it also gives false positives, so it's more likely for the lung to float, which then that becomes your criminal evidence to use against a woman who had a stillbirth and to say, "You murdered your newborn." So it's an absolute tragedy that we have these women who have lost a newborn, have given birth, and stillbirths are more common in the United States than we acknowledge.
I believe it's one in 150, and miscarriages are up to one in four, and again, these are generally genetic issues.
It's not anything that a woman could control, and yet you have that tragedy, and then you're criminally charged for it as well.
I was really shocked reading your discussion of the floating lung test, and it seemed particularly shocking how many cases are predicated on appallingly poor evidence and, in particular, poor scientific and medical evidence, not just in terms of these stillbirth and miscarriage cases, but across all of the themes that you look at.
And I'm quite surprised how many cases can progress within the American criminal justice system based on such shoddy science.
I can't imagine it happening in the same way in the system in the UK, particularly where because of the adversarial system and both parties having, uh, usually a right to rely on their own evidence, I think that means that there is a good pressure to make sure that you've got a very robust set of evidence to bring your case, obviously not in a criminal context, but in civil context in the UK.
Well, and even in the US, so if I'm bringing a civil case, if it's a civil case about money damages between two parties instead of a criminal case, there are high expectations for scientific evidence, and a lot of scientific evidence is excluded.
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