A/HRC/41/33 homes or places of worship, in order to attempt to force them to renounce their sexuality (see A/73/152). 36. Women in prostitution/sex work are likely to face deprivation of liberty because of laws and social attitudes that seek to control women’s morality and sexuality. In States where prostitution/sex work is criminalized, women are disproportionately affected and targeted by law enforcement agents. Even in countries where sex work itself is not a criminal offence, women who engage in it have high rates of interaction with the police and may be prosecuted and incarcerated for other offences, including loitering, vagrancy and public indecency, and for migration-related infractions. Short of incarceration, women in sex work/prostitution may, in some States, be confined to “re-education” institutions, designed to “cure” them of “deviant behaviour”. 37. Stereotypes regarding women’s sexual and moral behaviour are often linked with valuing women primarily for their reproductive capacity and requiring them to live up to certain ideals of motherhood. That comes with detrimental consequences for women’s liberty. In many cases where women are perceived as unable to fulfil the stereotyped expectations for reproduction and motherhood, as is frequently the case for women with disabilities, they may be viewed as “burdens”, be less valued by their families and communities, and therefore more susceptible to involuntary institutionalization (see A/HRC/40/54).26 There is also a linkage between the persecution and confinement of older women and the stereotyped notion that women beyond childbearing age have less social value (see para. 28 above). 38. Women may face deprivation of liberty when they do not conform to stereotyped notions of what constitutes good motherhood. Such stereotypes manifest particularly in the criminalization, detention and confinement of pregnant women who use, or are suspected of using, drugs. They frequently risk imprisonment for attempted abortion, miscarriage or harming the baby when using drugs during pregnancy. In addition, defying the dominant norms of motherhood may generally be taken as an aggravating circumstance in sentencing, while being a father may mostly constitute a mitigating circumstance. 39. Outside the justice system, pregnant women suspected of drug or alcohol use can also be involuntarily detained and forced to undergo medical treatment, often without sound medical evidence that they have a drug dependency or that the foetus is at risk. The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has noted that special laws designed to detain pregnant women suspected of drug use are “gendered and discriminatory … as pregnancy, combined with the presumption of drug or other substance abuse, is the determining factor for involuntary treatment” (A/HRC/36/37/Add.2, para. 74). There have also been cases of women being detained by hospitals simply to prevent them from choosing a home birth. 40. In States where abortion is criminalized, women risk incarceration for the decision to terminate a pregnancy, in some cases even when their own safety is at risk or when the foetus is not viable. In some countries, women are criminalized and incarcerated even when the termination was not their decision, as in cases of miscarriage. At times, public prosecutors have targeted women who have had abortions (whether spontaneous or induced) to enforce the harshest possible punishment, leading to longer incarceration. 41. Adolescent girls may be particularly exposed to deprivation of liberty for breaking social norms related to sexual and reproductive behaviour. In some States, they may be harshly punished for early or extramarital pregnancies, be excluded or expelled from school and confined at home or in an institution during pregnancy, while in many States they run a high risk of incarceration through seeking an illegal abortion. Furthermore, there exist hospitals and State institutions for detaining adolescent girls to prevent them terminating a pregnancy. 26 10 See also Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, general comment No. 3 (2016) on women and girls with disabilities.