Women's Reproductive Rights: America Out of Control

I remind you, the year is 2012, America is a western industrial country.

And this is just one of hundreds, if not thousands of stories that abound right now on States preoccupation with, and invasion of, Women's reproductive organs and rights. Lawmakers in the US! they could put the Taliban to shame.

How the "Pro-Life" Movement Puts Women Behind Bars

In Alabama, the claim that eggs, embryos and fetuses have separate legal rights has led to the jailing of 60 women.
By Lynn Paltrow and Emma S. Ketteringham
March 17, 2012

Numerous organizations and leaders who identify themselves as pro-life have assured the public that their efforts to re-criminalize abortion and establish the unborn as separate legal persons will not result in the prosecution and imprisonment of women. Yet, in Alabama alone, the claim that eggs, embryos and fetuses have separate legal rights has provided the basis for arresting approximately 60 women.

These women are being prosecuted under Alabama’s 2006 law designed to provide special penalties for people who bring children into methamphetamine laboratories. Its official title is "Endangerment of Exposing a Child to an Environment in Which Controlled Substances are Produced or Distributed" and it provides that a person “commits the crime of chemical endangerment” by “exposing a child to an environment in which he or she...knowingly, recklessly, or intentionally causes or permits a child to be exposed to, to ingest or inhale, or to have contact with a controlled substance.”

This law makes no mention of pregnancy, pregnant woman, drug use, fetus, or any other words that would make it applicable to a pregnant woman who uses a controlled substance and seeks to continue her pregnancy to term. In fact, the Alabama legislature has repeatedly refused to amend this law or to create others that would address the issue of pregnancy and drug use through the criminal law.

Nevertheless prosecutors have argued, and the Alabama’s Court of Criminal Appeals has agreed, that the word “child” in the statute includes a “viable fetus” and therefore may be used to arrest and jail women who become pregnant, eschew abortion, go to term, and try to bring life into this world, despite having used a controlled substance.

The Appeals Court decision reaches far beyond women who use illegal drugs or even drug use at all. Many prescription drugs are controlled substances and there is no defense under the law if the drug is prescribed to the pregnant woman. This means that a pregnant woman who is prescribed a controlled substance (and her doctor who prescribed it) are now potentially subject to criminal penalties as well. And, if the word “child” in one Alabama criminal laws means “viable fetus,” then surely it would have to mean the same thing in others – including the state’s child abuse and related laws. This means that women are potentially criminally liable for an unlimited range of actions, inactions or circumstances during pregnancy believed by police and prosecutors to pose a risk of harm to the fetus. (Think “personhood” measure in disguise.)

Hope Ankrom and Amanda Kimbrough are two of the 60 women who have been charged under the chemical endangering law – not for running meth labs or bringing children to them, but rather for continuing their pregnancies to term in spite of having a drug problem. Ankrom and Kimbrough have appealed their convictions to the Alabama Supreme Court.

Forty-seven medical, public health and legal advocacy groups and individuals, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Nurses Association filed an amicus (friend of the court) brief in support of these mothers. They urge the court to reverse the lower court’s radical extension of the chemical endangering law to permit prosecution and punishment of new mothers, pregnant women, and their doctors.

These organizations and experts explain that while they do not in any way endorse the use of illegal drugs during pregnancy, medical consensus is that illegal drug use by pregnant women does not pose risks qualitatively different or greater than a wide range of other actions, inactions, exposures, and circumstances engaged in or experienced by pregnant women, such as smoking cigarettes. Go to page two.

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