Since the passing of the Immigration Act 2014 in England, only those with indefinite permission to remain in the UK have been entitled to free, routine NHS care. This policy and legislative position is reflected across the Atlantic in the US, actuating social activism in the form of groups such as Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) as a counter discourse to the oppressive government position to migrants’ healthcare provision. In this chapter, we explore the different categorisations of risk applied to undocumented migrants to shed light on pregnant women and birthing people’s difficulties in accessing maternity care in England and the US. Using the lived experience of this marginalised group, we illuminate the complex social processes involved in risk categorisation to demonstrate the utility of understanding risk from a critical theoretical perspective, along with its potential application for improving maternal healthcare for those without documentation. Drawing on Beck’s Risk Society thesis, we show how being categorised as a risk renders these women as undeserving of maternity care regardless of clinical vulnerability, and we argue that the embodied suffering of risk has potential utility for unsettling discriminative policy and clinical practice.