Pink Crime: How the Legal System Criminalizes Motherhood, Pregnancy and Queerness

Law professor Valena Beety, founder of the Indiana Innocence Project, has written a jarring account of the multiple ways that women and queer people—particularly if they are poor and/or of color—are being arrested, convicted, and jailed for miscarriages, accidents, and sexual behavior that is considered deviant. In Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity, she focuses on the ways that the legal system uses racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia to prosecute people, many of whom have not committed an actual crime.  

Instead, as Christina Swarns, executive director of the Innocence Project, notes in her Introduction to the book, police, medical professionals, and juries often work together to  discipline community residents for their racial, economic, and gender identities rather than because they’ve done something unlawful.

It’s a horrifying assertion. 

First, author Beety explains how this happens by zeroing in on false confessions, an exceedingly common occurrence that lands hundreds of people in jail each year. “Trauma is a key factor when women falsely confess,” she writes. “Decades of research demonstrate that virtually any individual, given the appropriate circumstances, can be coerced into falsely confessing. The risk increases markedly when an individual is particularly vulnerable.” Moreover, use of deceptive tactics during interrogations, including repetition of blatantly false information, while legal, can cause an exhausted and terrified person to admit to something they did not do.

Tasha Mercedez Shelby is a case in point. Shelby was convicted of shaking her stepson to death in 2000 and has been in Central Mississippi Correctional Facility for more than 25 years.  While evidence supports her claim that the toddler died while having a seizure, attorney Beety has been unsuccessful in getting Shelby released;  it is her hope that Pink Crime will finally force a reconsideration of the flawed evidence and coerced confession that sent Shelby to jail. This is especially important, she writes, because one of the key witnesses against Shelby later recanted testimony in which he blamed the boy’s death on “shaken baby syndrome.”    

According to Beety, advancements in science prompted him to change his opinion and testify on Shelby’s behalf at a post-conviction hearing. “He officially amended the manner of death from homicide to accident,” Beety reports,  “and he confirmed the cause of death was neither shaking nor abuse.”

But this has not mattered.

Beety reports that police and prosecutors tend to rely on stereotypes about “bad mothers” to criminalize and incarcerate pregnant women and females who are deemed insufficiently protective of their children. To wit, moms have been arrested and charged with neglect for allowing their kids to witness domestic abuse. In some states, she writes, “if your husband beats you while you are pregnant, you can be criminally charged for failing to protect your fetus.”

In a phrase, it’s nuts – and it has dire consequences.  “Hundreds of mothers are incarcerated in Oklahoma under failure to protect laws, ” Beety writes.

And then there’s drug use. While it is obvious that using drugs during pregnancy should not be encouraged, prosecuting someone who miscarries if they or their fetus test positive serves no one.  For example, Beety documents a case in which a woman was given morphine for the pain she experienced when trying to expel the placenta. “She gave birth to a healthy baby girl and finally had the child in her arms,” Beety reports. “But she had signed a consent form for a drug test. Not surprisingly, the drug test came back as positive for morphine. As much as the couple insisted that the morphine was solely from what the hospital had earlier administered to the mother, the hospital, and soon after the social workers, responded that there was no way to tell.” The child was placed with Child Protective Services, sending the new parents into a maze of bureaucratic insanity before the newborn could go home.

“These are unjust, no crime convictions,” Beety concludes. In fact, even when drugs are willfully ingested, she writes that there “is rarely evidence that drug use caused harm to the fetus.” Her realization?  “It’s not about the health of the fetus; it is about punishing the mother for her alleged behavior and controlling the bodies of women.”

Furthermore, it goes without saying that wealthy women who go to private doctors when they miscarry are rarely if ever reported to law enforcement.

Queer families, Beety writes, are also targets and are questioned when they attempt to utilize Assisted Reproductive Technologies or seek gender-affirming care for themselves or for a child.

It’s part of a legal continuum with many discriminatory tangents: “Pink crimes encompass pregnant mothers charged with child abuse and fetal harm based on junk science; mothers incarcerated for the tragic, but normal, deaths of their children; doctors and patients prosecuted for harm to an embryo duing in vitro fertilization; parents separated  from their children for providing gender-affirming care; drag entertainers arrested for performing as a different gender; and queer people accused of grooming.”

The antidote, Beety writes, is visibility, speaking out about indignities and injustice, telling the stories of those victimized by punitive policies, and listening to victims’ accounts of what really happened. They’re important recommendations, reminders that silence always serves the status quo and not the people who have been arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed.

Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity
by Valena Beety
The New Press, 304 pages 
Release date: August 4, 2026