Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity

The subject of this session is the forthcoming book Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity by Valena Beety, which examines the criminalization of motherhood, pregnancy, and queer identity in the United States. The book draws a through line from historical wrongful convictions of women and queer people, often in cases where no crime actually occurred, to contemporary prosecutions involving pregnancy loss, parenting decisions, and queer identity. It argues that these cases are shaped by recurring and unreliable evidentiary practices, including flawed forensic science, coerced or internalized false confessions, and persistent gender and sexuality bias. The discussion will also address how enduring tropes of queer people as sexually dangerous or “groomers” contribute to new legal regimes that increasingly criminalize otherwise lawful conduct, raising urgent questions about the relationship between identity, criminal law, and contemporary forms of reproductive and queer governance.

Valena Elizabeth Beety is a law professor, innocence litigator, and former federal prosecutor who has exonerated the wrongfully convicted, secured presidential grants of clemency, and produced scholarship cited by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Her work centers the women and queer people most targeted by the U.S. criminal legal system. Beety served as the Founding Director of the West Virginia Innocence Project, and is currently the Robert McKinney Professor of Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law and a Founding Board Member of the Indiana Innocence Project. Her book Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights received a Gold Medal in Women’s Issues from the Independent Publishers Book Award, and her coursebook The Wrongful Convictions Reader is used in classrooms across the United States to teach about wrongful convictions.