Alabama Officials Back Down on Jailing Pregnant Women to ‘Protect’ Fetuses
Five pregnant and postpartum women being held on drug charges in an Alabama jail have been released after lawyers argued their bail conditions were “unconstitutional.”
One of the women, 23-year-old Ashley Banks, was arrested two days after she found out she was pregnant in May of this year and charged with possession of marijuana. She admitted to smoking weed two days earlier and was charged with “chemical endangerment of a child,” according to AL.com.
Under Alabama law, this meant she was held in Etowah County jail on a $10,000 cash bond in order to protect her fetus, and couldn’t leave unless she entered a drug rehab program.
Even when Banks’ family raised money for her cash bail, the payment was rejected because her bond conditions required her to have a place at a rehab facility. But specialists who evaluated her found twice that she couldn’t qualify for a place because she didn’t have a substance use disorder.
Burns was held in jail for three months, despite having a high-risk pregnancy and sleeping on the floor due to overcrowding, according to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), who represented Burns and the four other women.
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The women were arrested on charges of “chemical endangerment to a child,” a law originally passed in 2006 to protect children from the dangers of methamphetamine labs. But in 2013, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that law should also cover “unborn children,” and prosecutors across the state started filing more charges against pregnant women.
There have been more than 150 similar “chemical endangerment” cases in Etowah County since 2010, according to NAPW, more than in any other county in Alabama.
At least ten women have been held in the Etowah County jail on “chemical endangerment” charges in the last three months, according to a review of inmate rosters by The Daily Beast. Advocates say the number may be higher, according to conversations with their clients.
Another woman, Hali Burns, was arrested in July, six days after giving birth to her second child. After being drug tested at the hospital Burns tested positive for methamphetamine and Subutex, a drug used to help treat opioid addiction, according to a press release from the Etowah County Sheriff’s Office. Her lawyers say the test results were from legally prescribed and over-the-counter medications.
While she was held in jail for two months, Burns was not allowed to see her toddler or newborn, was denied postpartum care, and developed severe depression, according to NAPW.
“My little girl keeps asking what she did wrong and why she can’t come home,” Craig Battles, Bank’s boyfriend, told AL.com.
Lawyers working with NAPW filed habeas petitions arguing the bail conditions imposed on three of the women were unconstitutional and succeeded in getting the local policy changed. Etowah County reduced the bail bonds to $2,500 and released two additional women. However, they are still requiring the women to pay for pretrial monitoring and those who are pregnant have to submit to drug testing every 48 to 72 hours, according to Emma Roth, a staff attorney at NAPW.
Roth hopes this new policy will mean fewer pregnant and postpartum women are detained indefinitely.
“This is a really significant victory and a huge step forward,” Roth said, “But it is not until the statute is amended or repealed that we can say that pregnancy and substance abuse will not be criminalized, but treated as a public health issue.”
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