Post-Dobbs pregnancy-related charges exceed 400 in 16 states, report finds
A Guardian investigation published this week found that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not tracked miscarriages among women in its custody since October 3, 2025, even as the agency arrests a record number of pregnant women and teenagers. ICE recorded 18 miscarriages during the first nine months of the Trump administration, the investigation reported, but the agency has maintained no data on pregnancy losses since that date. Detained pregnant women are reportedly not receiving the prenatal healthcare they need.
The data gap comes as the federal government has emphasized surveillance of pregnancy outcomes elsewhere. Dr. Erica Schwartz, confirmed earlier this year by the U.S. Senate as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at her confirmation hearing that “Abortion surveillance is absolutely a critical component of what the CDC is currently doing.” The CDC does not require states to collect abortion data, but the Guttmacher Institute counts 44 states plus Washington, D.C. as having some form of mandated abortion reporting.
The investigation was discussed in a Guardian opinion column by Arwa Mahdawi, who contrasted the Trump administration’s stated pronatalism with the treatment of pregnant immigrants in custody. Mahdawi wrote that “Maga men have babies on the brain” and are “very keen on population growth.” “[W]e want more babies, to put it very nicely,” Donald Trump said last year. Trump has called himself the “father of IVF” and joked that he will be known as the “fertilization president,” according to Mahdawi. Only a few days after being sworn in as vice president, JD Vance declared he wanted “more babies in the United States of America” and went on to make pronatalist policies a theme of his time in office, Mahdawi reported.
Mahdawi also pointed to Elon Musk as another administration figure publicly promoting population growth. Ashley St Clair, identified by Mahdawi as the mother of one of Musk’s “many offspring,” has claimed Musk once told her he wanted to have “a legion of children before the civil war.” Mahdawi noted that at least one of Musk’s children has denounced him, writing that she is “not sure he’s considered that they might not all be fighting on the same side.”
The 18 miscarriages documented through October 3, 2025 represent the only public count of pregnancy losses in ICE custody available since the start of the Trump administration. Mahdawi characterized the data gap as “very strange,” noting that ICE and the Trump administration are “normally very big on surveillance.”
Earlier Guardian reporting described a parallel surveillance program that reached pregnant immigrant women giving birth. Last year, the Guardian reported that pregnant immigrant women were arriving at hospitals to deliver their babies while wearing location-tracking smartwatches as part of an ICE monitoring program. In one case, a woman was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia, a condition that can cause severe swelling, and hospital staff were concerned that the smartwatch would cut off her circulation. “She was in tears about [the idea of taking the surveillance device off],” a hospital staffer told the Guardian. “She had this deep fear that ICE was going to come to the hospital and take her baby.”
In the first two years after Roe was overturned, prosecutors in 16 states charged more than 400 people with pregnancy-related crimes, a 2025 report by the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice found. The report noted that the documented cases likely understate the total, with many prosecutions of miscarriage and pregnancy loss never making headlines.