Book 77 for 2026: Pink Crime

Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity, by Valena Beety.

This book opens with an inaccurate claim. Most of us have heard of the no-win "swimming test" for witchcraft in colonial times: throw the accused into a body of water. If she sinks, she's innocent but probably dead; if she floats, she's executed for witchcraft. I get why this is an apt comparison for the modern "floating lung test," which is used to inaccurately "prove" that a stillborn infant was born alive and killed later. But the author claims on page 1 of Pink Crime that the swimming test was used in the infamous Salem witch trials in 1692. It wasn't, and this is easily checked, so I have to wonder about the fact-checking in the rest of this book. Which is frustrating, because the topic is important.

Part of Pink Crime is about wrongful convictions of women, which follow a different pattern than with men. When a man is wrongly convicted, there was usually an actual crime, and the wrong  person was blamed (and often coerced into a "confession"), as with the Central Park Five, now known as the Exonerated Five. DNA can be used to establish factual innocence.

With women, the more common pattern is that there was no crime. An accidental injury or natural death is wrongly attributed to abuse, and a wrongful conviction can be nearly impossible to overturn. As a generalization (with all the usual caveats for generalizations), women are socialized to be agreeable and submit to authority, and can be pressured into confessions, especially if they're already feeling guilty because their child had an accident. Juries can be swayed by prosecutors portraying them as "unfeminine" or "bad mothers." With the criminalization of abortion in multiple states, miscarriages and stillbirths get investigated as possible homicides.

With LGBT+ people, there is a pattern of trying to criminalize identity altogether. Examples include anti-drag laws (as if there was some timeless standard for men's vs. women's clothes), and banning transgender people from playing sports or using restrooms that align with their gender identity. In some states, there has been a push to ban gender-affirming health care, and to criminalize adults who affirm a trans minor's identity in any way - even something as innocuous as using their preferred name or pronouns. Again, stereotypes are used to make LGBT people seems scary, such as calling it "grooming" if they exist anywhere near a child.

There are a number of cases used as examples in the book, some of which include egregious misconduct by police and/or prosecutors. It's a topic that deserves a hard look, and I hope the author does some rigorous fact-checking before the next edition.

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