All in the name of protecting the fetus
Do some meditation (or drinking) before you read this. It’s clear that members of the right truly despise pregnant women. They certainly have no compassion for them. Or the fetuses and babies they claim to revere. This happened to a pregnant woman in Alabama for smoking pot. I’m sure it’s not unique:
Police arrested Ashley Banks on May 25 with an unregistered gun and a small amount of marijuana.
Under normal circumstances, the 23-year-old from Gadsden would have been able to post bond and leave jail until her criminal trial. But Banks admitted to smoking pot on the same day she found out she was pregnant – two days before her arrest. In Etowah County, that meant she couldn’t leave jail unless she entered drug rehab, leaving her in limbo for three months.
She’s not the only one, according to attorneys involved in her case. Several pregnant women and new moms accused of exposing their fetuses to drugs have been held for weeks or months inside the Etowah County Detention Center under special bond conditions that require rehab and $10,000 cash.
Attorneys with National Advocates for Pregnant Women, an organization that opposes laws that criminalize pregnancy, say it’s unfair to impose special conditions on pregnant women who haven’t been convicted of any crimes.
As a result of the policy, the Etowah County Detention Center often holds several pregnant and postpartum women in the jail, against the advice of experts on maternal and fetal health. Dr. Carolyn Sufrin, an OB/GYN and expert on incarceration and pregnancy at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, wrote an affidavit urging the court to release Banks.
“The stress and conditions in jail and prisons, including lack of consistent access to standard prenatal care and mental health care, poor diets, poor sanitation, infestations with bugs and vermin, poor ventilation, tension, noise, lack of privacy, lack of family and community contact, can be detrimental to physical and mental health which can result in poor pregnancy outcomes for both the mother and the baby,” Sufrin wrote.
Banks has a high-risk pregnancy due to a family history of miscarriage. She said she was jailed at around six weeks of pregnancy. About six weeks into her incarceration, she started bleeding and was taken to Gadsden Regional Medical Center, according to court documents. Doctors diagnosed her with a subchorionic hematoma, a condition where blood pools near the wall of the uterus.
The condition increases the chances of miscarriage and preterm delivery, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Banks said jail officials told her she could sleep on the bottom bunk because of her high-risk pregnancy. However, her cell had one bottom bunk and two women assigned to sleep in it. So, the other woman used the bed, according to court documents, and Banks slept on the floor.
She continued to bleed for five weeks in jail. She said she also suffered from hunger and fainting spells. Two times, specialists evaluated her for drug addiction and found she didn’t qualify for free addiction services offered through the state. Her lawyers said investigators then urged Banks to say she had a drug addiction she did not have to bond out.
“Ms. Banks is currently incarcerated indefinitely because the State will not accept her $10,000.00 cash bail and she does not qualify for a residential drug treatment,” her petition said.
Since her bond conditions required rehab, and since rehab wouldn’t take her, she continued sleeping on a jailhouse floor until Aug. 25, when an Etowah County judge released her to community corrections.
They did this to a pregnant woman because they found she had smoked weed. And because she refused to cop to a serious drug habit she did not have, she entered into a Kafkaesque nightmare with no alternative. It’s sick.
She’s not the only one. And according to the rest of the article they also remove women from their newborns and throw them into jail without proper medical care for the same reasons. The conditions are grotesque.
These people are torturing pregnant women in the name of protecting fetuses and babies. And it’s going to get worse as these forced pregnancy laws take effect and they start arresting women for having miscarriages and seeking abortions. I can’t even imagine what it will be like in the 3rd world red states in a few years.