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At the beginning of the school year, someone affiliated with Kirkwood Community College¹ in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where I live, reached out to let me know that professors at the college are being asked to identify and report students who could be pregnant.
The reporting is part of Title IX requirements that ask schools to make sure that students are aware of Title IX protections. But multiple people who work for the college voiced concerns about identifying potentially pregnant students in red states that have restricted abortion access. What if a student is reported as pregnant one day, then three weeks later is no longer pregnant because they went out of state for an abortion? What privacy violations or criminal liability could this open people up to?
To back up just a little bit: Title IX is a federal law that protects people against sex-based discrimination at institutions that receive federal funding. This year, the Biden administration added new rules and protections to Title IX, seeking to undo the unraveling of Title IX under the Trump administration.
The new rules extend protections to LGBTQ+ students and pregnant students, and the federal government requires schools to make students aware of those protections. That’s why educators are being asked to report and identify students who could be pregnant.
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When I reached out to Kirkwood’s Title IX coordinator, Melissa Payne, she explained, “As with other areas of Title IX, our faculty are trained that their obligation is to report, and the Title IX staff communicate rights and resources. If faculty are made aware of a Title IX related issue (including pregnancy), they report that to me or one of the Deputy Title IX Coordinators. They also make the student aware that someone will be reaching out to inform the student about rights and resources.”
An email sent to me by a Kirkwood employee also noted that it is not appropriate for faculty to ask if a student is pregnant. Faculty must only report if “a student self discloses or a faculty member receives knowledge of a pregnancy (i.e. it was written in a paper or has been communicated to another employee (such as the front desk representative))...”
Payne assured me that privacy concerns are being taken very seriously.
But it’s not wrong to be paranoid in Iowa under the new rules. The state attorney general, Brenna Bird, has a vindictive, reactionary right-wing agenda. The rules surrounding the state's six-week ban are confoundingly vague and purposely so.
A new report out this week from Pregnancy Justice found that since 2022, 210 women have been prosecuted for “crimes” related to their pregnancies, with the majority of those cases occurring in Alabama and Texas. According to an AP story, “Wendy Bach, a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law and one of the lead researchers on the project, said one of the cases was when a woman delivered a stillborn baby at her home about six or seven months into pregnancy. Bach said that when the woman went to make funeral arrangements, the funeral home alerted authorities and the woman was charged with homicide.”
People should be allowed to seek medical care, have pregnancies, miscarriages, and stillbirths, as well as live births, and experience the hope, joy, grief, and pain of these events, without fear of legal repercussions.
But in states with abortion restrictions, people’s lives and personal safety are at risk for the crime of having reproductive organs.
Additional surveillance through institutions such as colleges and universities can and will open pregnant people to further scrutiny. And students shouldn’t have to worry that a passing comment or an assignment that they write about their pregnancy will get them reported to their institution.
While Title IX protections are well-intentioned, individuals cannot trust institutions to have their best interests at heart. Especially when those institutions are beholden to state oversight and state legislators for funding.
We saw this with the rollback of DEI initiatives in Iowa. Institutions complied with state pressure and cut DEI programs. Or maybe “complied” isn’t the word, since many seemed eager to do so.
Beyond that, we can also look at what is happening in other states, where vague and poorly worded abortion bans have made even doctors, afraid to test the limits of the law to protect patients.
In Georgia, one result of the state’s abortion ban was Amber Nicole Thurman bleeding to death in a hospital parking lot. It’s true that the cost for doctors helping her earlier could have been severe (prosecution and even imprisonment), but for Thurman the cost was her life.
It’s not safe to be pregnant in America right now. It’s not safe to have a child or a miscarriage. It’s not safe to experience the everyday miracles of conception, pregnancy and birth, nor the complications and loss that can accompany them. The end result of all these laws made in the name of our safety and the protection of our babies was the loss of our lives and safety.
An institution demanding that educators report and out students who may or may not be pregnant, even under the guise of Title IX protections, makes those students vulnerable to surveillance and possible reprisal in a state where any element of pregnancy can be prosecuted as a crime.
It is not illegal in Iowa to seek an abortion outside of the state.
If you are pregnant and need help you can confidentially and safely contact the Chicago Access Fund or the Emma Goldman Clinic.
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