Prof. Caren Morrison: Pregnancy as Modern Coverture

Join us December 13 at noon AZ time as we welcome Professor Caren Morrison, Professor of Law  at the  Center for Access to Justice at the University of Georgia. She’ll discuss her research into pregnancy as a modern form of coverture post-Dobbs.

Click here to watch this presentation on Secular AZ’s YouTube channel. 

Caren Morrison is a professor of law at Georgia State University College of Law, where she teaches evidence, criminal procedure, law & literature, and women’s legal history. She served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York from 2001 to 2006, where she prosecuted narcotics and organized crime cases, and joined the faculty at GSU in 2009. Her research focuses on police violence, domestic homicide, and the place of women in the common law. Her article, State Abortion Bans: Pregnancy as a New Form of Coverture, was published in the Virginia Law Review Online in December 2022.

From Professor Morrison’s article: “Since Dobbs, some conservative states have made abortion a felony from the moment of conception, threatening doctors with life sentences, all in the name of protecting fetal life. This Essay argues that these bans, rather than protecting life, work to suspend women’s legal existence while they are pregnant. In this way, what these restrictions resemble most is the common law doctrine of coverture.

At common law, coverture meant that a married woman’s legal identity would be “covered” by that of her husband, with the two being deemed one in the eyes of the law—the one being the husband. What is happening now is a new kind of coverture—fetal coverture. But unlike marital coverture, which at least provided some material and legal benefits, fetal coverture just opens up a whole new world of health risks and legal peril. This account explains the absolutism of the new laws, which subsume the legal identity of the woman into that of her fetus.”