How the Law Criminalizes Mothers, Pregnancy, and Families

Join us for a conversation on family policing and the criminalization of motherhood, pregnancy, and queer identity, featuring legal scholar and author Valena Beety and family policing abolitionist Miriam Mack.

Valena Beety is the author of the forthcoming book Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity. Drawing on her work as co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project, Beety examines how women and queer people are increasingly prosecuted not for what they've done, but for who they are — from pregnancy loss charged as murder, to parents losing custody over positive drug tests, to wrongful convictions built on junk science and bias. Pink Crime traces how fetal personhood laws, the fall of Roe v. Wade, and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation have expanded the reach of the criminal legal system into pregnancy, motherhood, and identity itself.

Miriam Mack is Campaigns & Advocacy Director and Senior Legal Counsel at Movement for Family Power, where she uses litigation, policy advocacy, and organizing to help grow, support, and build capacity for the movement to abolish family policing. A movement lawyer and former Policy Director of the Bronx Defenders' Family Defense Practice, Mack brings years of frontline experience representing parents in neglect, abuse, and termination-of-parental-rights cases, and organizing to dismantle family policing systems.

Together, Beety and Mack will explore how criminal law, the "child welfare system," and reproductive politics intersect to surveil, punish, and separate families — and what it will take to build a system rooted in support rather than punishment.

LOCATION: Furman Hall 212

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