Alabama is jailing pregnant marijuana users to 'protect' fetuses

[Jilly_in_VA]

Moira Donegan

At a traffic stop, the police officer found a small amount of weed. Ashley Banks, a 23-year-old woman living in Alabama, admitted to the cops that she had smoked marijuana two days earlier. It was the same day that she learned she was pregnant. She was six weeks along. It was this disclosure – that she was pregnant – that led Etowah county officials to keep her in jail, without a trial, for the next three months.

Alabama has an exceptionally high incarceration rate, locking up about 938 people per 100,000 residents. But even in a state with a disproportionate prison population, an arrest for small-scale drug possession would not usually lead to such an extended pre-trial jail stay. But Banks fell victim to a peculiar Alabama law that advocates say Etowah county enforces with special zeal: pregnant women who are arrested for drug offenses are not allowed to post bail and go free, the way other people are. They have to stay in state custody: either in jail, or in a residential drug rehab program. The logic is that the women are a danger to their fetuses: they need to be imprisoned by the state, and kept from their freedom, in order to protect their pregnancies.

In Banks’s case, jail officials tried to send her to rehab, but after an assessment, the facility turned her away: Banks, they said, was merely a casual marijuana user, not an addict, and did not need in-patient drug treatment. Too healthy for rehab, but not trusted enough by the state to be set free, she was kept in limbo in jail. Meanwhile, Banks’s pregnancy wasn’t going well. She has a family history of miscarriages, and was experiencing bleeding in jail. At one point, jail officials assigned her to sleep in a bed that was already occupied by another prisoner; Banks slept on the floor.

She’s not the only one. Another woman, Hali Burns, was taken to the Etowah county jail just six days after giving birth to her son, with police saying that she had tested positive for a drug used by pregnant women with opioid addictions to help manage cravings and withdrawal. When she was thrown in jail, Burns was still physically recovering from giving birth. But the jail had no facilities for her to pump or tend to her wounds. Her partner tried to bring pads and underwear to her, so that she wouldn’t have to bleed into her clothes, but Etowah county authorities wouldn’t let her have them. The risk for infection was great – the indignity was even greater.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/12/alabama-jailing-pregnant-marijuana-users-protect-fetuses

Alabummer hates women. Especially women of color.

[TheRealNorth]

1. They doing the same to women with a pack of cigarettes too?

[canuckledragger]

4. Of course not.

Because they would have to treat white women the same way, and we all know that isn't going to happen.

[BlueJac]

2. Why would anyone live in this state?

[childfreebychoice]

3. Some ppl can't afford to leave. The more pressing question for me as black

Woman, why black/brown women are even getting pregnant in red states, that already have high maternal/infant mortality rates, even for woman of color, with private ins