Breaking: "First Degree Homicide Of The Unborn Child Bill" Passes CO House On Second Reading

[Bolo Boffin]

117. Found this article on Twitter re: meth lab laws in Alabama being used to prosecute pregnant women

60 so far...

http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/154586/how_the_%22pro-life%22_movement_puts_women_behind_bars

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.

That's the crazy thing about this: the prosecutions are of women who are carrying the baby to term! Of course it's a terrible thing for a pregnant woman to use drugs, but it should be possible to penalize those things without entrenching the notion of a fetus being a person further into law.