Last week, the world learned the chilling news that Marshae Jones, a 28-year-old woman who was five months pregnant when shot in the stomach, has been charged with manslaughter. When a grand jury failed to indict Ebony Jemison, the woman who fired the gun, the police in Pleasant Grove, Ala., sought someone else — and landed on Ms. Jones, whom they now blame for the altercation that led to the termination of her pregnancy. To the police, if Ms. Jones had not picked a fight, her fetus would have survived.

In Alabama, somehow all of this makes sense. Sadly, I am not surprised. In recent years, Alabama has led the nation in charging pregnant women under its chemical endangerment statute, which now extends to fetuses. When a case brought in 2011 under that statute, Ankrom v. Alabama, was appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court, the justices concluded that they saw no difference between a child and a fetus — and no difference between a viable fetus and a nonviable fetus. (In that case, which involved two defendants, one woman who had struggled with drug addiction gave birth to a stillborn son. She was arrested, and she took a plea deal of 10 years rather than face the possibility of life imprisonment.)

Let us be clear: Anyone who thinks it is the recently passed Alabama abortion law alone that sets the state apart on reproductive health is wrong. Alabama police and prosecutors strategically wield power and influence with hospitals and medical clinicians to ferret out women who “endanger” their pregnancies. By one count, there have been 479 arrested in Alabama for endangering their pregnancies and charged under the state’s chemical endangerment statute.

But make no mistake, fetal protection prosecutions are not confined to Alabama.

In 2006, at 16, Rennie Gibbs experienced a stillbirth. Mississippi prosecutors charged her with depraved-heart murder, claiming that her use of drugs during pregnancy showed reckless disregard for human life and was the cause of the stillbirth. In 2014, a judge dismissed the charge, but had Ms. Gibbs been convicted, she could have received a life sentence.