It's a Boy!...And You're Going to Jail.

"A day after she gave birth in 2006, Tiffany Hitson, 20, sat on her front porch crying, barefoot and handcuffed. A police officer hovered in the distance. Ms. Hitson’s newborn daughter had traces of cocaine and marijuana in its system, and the young woman, baby-faced herself, had fallen afoul of a tough new state law intended to protect children from drugs, and a local prosecutor bent on pursuing it. She made arrangements for the baby’s care, and headed off to a year behind bars.

Over an 18-month period, at least eight women have been prosecuted for using drugs while pregnant in this rural jurisdiction of barely 37,000, a tally without any recent parallel that women’s advocates have been able to find.

There has not been a murder here [Andalusia, Alabama] in over three years, the prosecutor said. But a year ago a newborn died at the local hospital, and the mother had traces of methamphetamines in her system. Doctors told the police that the infant’s premature birth could be attributed to maternal drug use, and she was charged with “chemical endangerment of child,” which carries a sentence of 10 years to life in prison.

-Crackdown on Pregnant Drug Users, NY-Times

This article made my jaw drop and made me angry. I am sure that the police and prosecutors are having a hard time stopping illegal meth labs in their county so they punish the families of addicts to appear as though they are accomplishing something in their little corner of the drug war. It's clear from police affidavits that doctors, police, prosecutors, judges, and social workers all collaborate to send these women off to county jails, state prisons, or drug rehab clinics. What do you think that does to the doctor/patient relationship? Who are these women supposed to go to in order to get help if they wanted to kick their addictions for themselves and their unborn babies! One OBGYN in Oklahoma said in an editorial for The Oklahoman that these prosecutions are actually pushing women to have abortions rather than risk arrest for a bad outcome during a delivery (link).

The prosecutor Greg L. Gambril just looks like a jerk and his comments in the article don't really do much to change that perception. Look drugs are awful and do horrible things to families, children, and entire communities. Unfortunately the state has to get involved in order to protect chilren. But sending these women most of whom are young, poor, uneducated, and jobless to prison isn't the answer. My sister is a social worker extraordinaire and I can guarantee you that in thirty minutes she could come up with much more effective, efficient, and cheaper ways to help these women break their drug use AND become better mothers in the process. Unfortunately the paternalistic tendencies of the south and the unforgiving nature of the religious environment of these small towns have worked to oppress these women who need help more than they need punishment.

It might be easy to regard this kind of prosecutorial overreaching as a rural southern phenomenon, but you would be wrong. The National Advocates for Pregnant Women [NAPW] have been documenting the increasingly punitive laws aimed at women who deliver babies with drugs in their systems. These cases are disturbing because of the lengths the state can go to separate mothers from their newborn children, and punish women based more on assumptions of causality rather than a direct scientific evidence.

Let me say, I am not advocating that women who deliver babies with drugs in their systems shouldn't have any intervention. They should have intervention. But jail isn't an intervention, it's a tool that's used to punish and keep people segregated who are a menace to society. These women need a hand up not a lock-down.