The Helpline Behind the Pregnancy Criminalization Headlines

If/When/How’s free legal hotline answers about 300 callers a month

If/When/How staffers rally outside the Supreme Court. Courtesy of If/When/How

Kylee Sunderlin, the legal services director of If/When/How, has worked at the organization for six years, supporting callers through a wide range of legal threats over their reproductive decisions or pregnancy outcomes. One particular story has stayed with her.

A 14-year-old and her mother living in a state that bans abortion made plans to travel to help the teen get care. Traveling for health care is legal, yet the mother was reported to Child Protective Services. CPS then separated her and her daughter, and by the time they were reunited, it was too late for the daughter to access abortion.

The state violence persisted even after the birth. CPS targeted the family again, this time, concerned that the daughter had given birth at such a young age—after CPS and the state’s abortion ban, together, forced her to give birth in the first place.

This is the unthinkable level of cruelty and state violence that we’re up against—and precisely why If/When/How’s Helpline exists. The organization raised funds for the family to prepare for the baby and successfully fended off CPS’ investigation after the baby’s birth, ensuring the family could stay together.

Sunderlin tells Abortion, Every Day that stories like this—children forced to give birth, parents surveilled and punished for trying to help their children, families terrorized by CPS and other state agencies—are more common than we think. If/When/How’s Helpline answers about 300 callers per month. Callers include terrified young people in banned states; domestic violence victims whose partners are threatening to call the cops if they get abortions; victims of obstetric racism or other forms of obstetric violence; family members of women who have been arrested for miscarriages or self-managed abortions.

“If there’s state violence in response to someone’s reproductive experience, we want to be there supporting them. Almost every case you see in the media where someone is criminalized for abortion or pregnancy, their family has reached out to us.”

The mother and daughter’s experience reflects the dual, sweeping violence of abortion bans and the legal and family policing systems. The crisis of family separation, Sunderlin tells Abortion, Every Day, isn’t limited to our nation’s unjust immigration policies: “It’s happening here in our backyards, all around us.”

In this case, the state’s separation of a mother and daughter also functioned as a ban on abortion-related travel, exploiting the stigma and barriers surrounding youth abortion access.

The anti-abortion movement has long weaponized faux panics over ‘parental rights’ to target youth abortion access and abortion access broadly—but when parents exercise their right to get their child out-of-state care, this is what happens.

In 2023, six children under 12 were among at least 100 minors who had to leave Texas to have abortions. What if their parents had been reported to CPS before they could leave the state? Stories of young people denied care often go untold. We’ll hear of them occasionally: for instance, the 12-year-old girl in Mississippi who was forced to give birth just before the seventh grade.

Sometimes, minors are too afraid to seek help from a parent or trusted adult at all: laws in Idaho and Tennessee aim to criminalize adults who help them travel out-of-state for abortion, and other states have introduced similar legislation. Even if these bills don’t pass or are blocked by the courts, they still have a chilling effect. The laws are endlessly confusing; teens—and everyone, really—need a hotline they can turn to in an era of mass disinformation, online censorship, and automation.

As teens turn to AI chatbots that sometimes steer them toward anti-abortion lies, Sunderlin says callers “give a sigh of relief” when she confirms they’re speaking to a human being. “The law is complicated and neither a bot nor a collection of algorithms is able to provide accurate legal advice geared toward a person’s unique needs,” she explained.

“It’s important for people to understand what the law says vs. what happens in reality can be so different. For someone to just hear you tell them, ‘they’re investigating you, but you didn’t actually break the law,’ sometimes they’ll cry from relief.”

Abortion bans supposedly don’t criminalize patients, but there are too many examples of pregnant people—especially vulnerable young people—being punished, anyway: they’re charged with ‘child endangerment’ and ‘abuse of a corpse’ for miscarrying, or their abusers threaten to call the police or sue if they access abortion.

“There’s a frequent trend where people contact us and say the ultimate barrier to accessing abortion is state laws, their intimate partner, or a combination of both,” Sunderlin says. When the Helpline encounters this, their work extends beyond helping this individual access care or receive legal representation—they help the caller form a safety plan, follow up after their abortion, and “ensure we’re not just a one-call experience, but make sure all our callers are safe and receive follow-up support.”

When Sunderlin joined If/When/How in 2018, the hotline primarily existed to offer clarification about state abortion laws, receiving about five callers per month—compared with 300 now. Overhauled under Sunderlin’s leadership in 2020, the Helpline now offers a wide range of legal advocacy and support to hundreds of callers, connecting people with values-aligned attorneys, collaborating with public defenders, providing financial support for bail, and, more generally, getting their callers the help they need—whatever that may be.

For example, when one of their callers who faced incarceration over a pregnancy outcome expressed that she wanted to get her GED, Sunderlin helped connect her to a tutor. If/When/How’s extensive network of volunteers and advocates isn’t limited to lawyers. Everyone who’s committed to reproductive justice can be a part of their network and support their work in some way. As a Michigan-based attorney, Sunderlin, herself, also helps Michigan teens seek judicial bypass to access abortion.

Sunderlin decided to pursue law out of a commitment to social justice, understanding it as a vehicle for “harm reduction.” Growing up, she experienced firsthand the cruelty and disruption of the family policing system as a child. Today, she’s committed to helping young people and families navigate the same complex, often oppressive systems that her own family had to navigate.

Kylee Sunderlin, legal services director at If/When/How. Courtesy of If/When/How

Today, through headline after headline about women jailed over miscarriages, or mothers criminalized or otherwise punished for helping their daughters access care, her goal overseeing the Helpline is to nip as many of these cases in the bud, ensure no charges are filed at all, and prevent these headlines altogether.

After all, even when charges are dropped, the trauma, public scrutiny, and social ostracism are irreversible.

Sunderlin shared a story she takes particular pride in involving a young person in a banned state who ordered abortion pills, self-managed their abortion, and was reported to police by an unreliable friend. Sunderlin was able to get in contact with the prosecuting attorney, listened to the different statutes the prosecutor intended to charge the individual under, and explained, in each case, why these statutes didn’t apply. The prosecutor then closed the investigation altogether, realizing there was no case.

“Those are the most satisfying circumstances,” Sunderlin says.

The earlier the Helpline can get to an individual who’s being targeted by the state, the better—that’s why we all have a responsibility to ensure our communities know this resource is available to them and their loved ones, whether they think they’ll ever need it or not.

And, no matter what an individual may be navigating—be that the start of a state investigation into their pregnancy outcome, or at any other stage of state intervention—they can call the Helpline and get the support they need.

You can reach the Helpline at 844-868-2812, or online at ReproLegalHelpline.org. If you’re able to donate to support their essential work, you can do so, here. You can also direct donations to the 14-year-old’s family, here.