Does the Mother Go to Jail if a Baby Dies of Oxycodone?
The Criminalization of Bad Mothers
On a rainy mean solar day just subsequently Thanksgiving, Amanda Kimbrough played with her two-year-old girl in her raw-forest-paneled living room, petting her terriers and one-half-watching TV. Kimbrough, who is 32, lives a few miles outside Russellville, a town of fewer than 10,000 in rural northwestern Alabama, near the border of Franklin and Colbert Counties. Textiles were the economic engine of the area until the 1990s, when the industry went into turn down and mills shut down. Now 1 of the region's leading employers is Pilgrim'due south, a chicken supplier. The median household income is $31,213, and more than than a tertiary of children live below the poverty line.
As family members came in and out of the room and one daytime show slid into another — "The People's Court," "Intervention," "Jerry Springer," "The Ellen DeGeneres Evidence" — Kimbrough talked about her arrest following the death of her third child, Timmy Jr. Built-in premature at 25 weeks on April 29, 2008, Timmy Jr. weighed 2 pounds 1 ounce, and lived only 19 minutes. When Kimbrough tested positive for methamphetamine, her ii daughters were swiftly removed from her custody, and for ninety days, she was allowed only supervised visits. Social services mandated parenting classes and drug treatment.
That would have been a typical response in most places, but Alabama is different. Six months after Timmy Jr.'s decease, the district chaser in Colbert County charged Kimbrough with chemical endangerment of a child, a Class A felony (because the infant died) that carries a mandatory sentence of 10 years to life. She turned herself in, and bail was set at $250,000. At the trial, the country completed its case in two days. On the advice of her lawyer, Kimbrough then pleaded guilty and received the minimum sentence of 10 years.
According to Kyle Brownish, the chief banana commune chaser in the case, Kimbrough might have received far more than time if a jury had plant her guilty. "She caused the decease of another person," Angela Hulsey, an assistant district attorney on the instance, said, "a person that volition never have the take chances to go to school, go to the prom, become married, accept children of their own. You lot're dealing with the virtually innocent of victims."
When I met Kimbrough last autumn, she was free on an entreatment bail. (Her plea bargain allows her lawyers to entreatment her conviction on constitutional grounds without contesting the specifics of her instance.) Kimbrough said she never had a large problem with meth, just admitted that she started using the drug in her mid-20s, afterward her first marriage complanate. When she was pregnant with Timmy Jr., she did meth merely one time, she told me.
"Once," she said. "I don't even know why I done it. I guess the Devil knocked on my shoulder that solar day." Otherwise, Kimbrough insisted, she abstained from drugs during her pregnancy, even refusing painkillers for an infected tooth for fear they would hurt the baby. Timmy Jr.'southward birth had many potentially complicating factors, including prematurity and a prolapsed cord. Kimbrough says she was eager to have the kid — she had always wanted a boy. She and her husband, Timmy Sr., were told at an early-April prenatal visit that Timmy Jr. would likely accept Down syndrome, and while abortion was an option, the Kimbroughs, who oppose ballgame on moral grounds, did not consider information technology. "We didn't care if he was special needs," Timmy Sr. said. "We would have loved him."
Kimbrough told me that she was devastated by the loss of her babe and scared of existence locked up. She described a recent visit to her brother in prison, where he is serving time for burglary and other charges, and how upset she was past the identify.
"I experience for people on drugs," she continued. "Yous got to stay away from people that's on them. I learned that in rehab, and I been make clean ever since. I feel like I iced the cake with this one. To me, losing a kid. . . . " She stared off into space.
Kimbrough's cheerful x-twelvemonth-erstwhile, Brooke, arrived home from school, shaking the rain off her coat and chatting about a new necklace. In quick succession, Kimbrough checked Brooke's backpack for new library books, fixed peanut-butter crackers and braided a doll's pilus. "She has to take care of everybody," her adult stepdaughter Amy told me. "She's a female parent hen."
You might not expect a rural Alabama mother with a felony confidence to have in her corner a national army of feminists, ceremonious libertarians and gynecologists, but Kimbrough'south instance has attracted the involvement of groups similar Planned Parenthood, the A.C.L.U. and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, who all maintain that her conviction sets a dangerous precedent. Emma Ketteringham, the director of legal advocacy at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a New York-based reproductive-justice group, has been following Kimbrough's instance closely. She has drafted "friend of the court" briefs for Kimbrough signed by groups similar the National Organization for Women-Alabama and the American Medical Association. She argues that applying Alabama'southward chemical-endangerment law to pregnant women "violates constitutional guarantees of liberty, privacy, equality, due process and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment." In issue, she says, under Alabama's chemical-endangerment law, pregnant women take go "a special class of people that should be treated differently from every other citizen." And, she says, the law violates meaning women's constitutional rights to equal protection under the police force. Ketteringham likewise recruited ii prominent Alabama lawyers, Jake Watson and Brian Thou. White, to take Kimbrough's case pro bono. "I dear babies, too, but I don't like locking up their mamas," Watson told me.
There take been approximately 60 chemical-endangerment prosecutions of new mothers in Alabama since 2006, the yr the statute was enacted. Originally created to protect children from potentially explosive meth labs, Alabama's chemical-endangerment law prohibits a "responsible person" from "exposing a child to an environment in which he or she . . . knowingly, recklessly or intentionally causes or permits a kid to be exposed to, to ingest or inhale, or to have contact with a controlled substance, chemical substance or drug paraphernalia."
Criminal convictions of women for their newborns' positive drug tests are rare in other states, lawyers familiar with these cases say. In most places, maternal drug use is considered a affair for kid protective services, non for law enforcement. Advocates for Kimbrough insist that, in any case, Alabama'due south chemical-endangerment law was never meant to employ to meaning women's drug use. "The words 'womb,' 'uterus,' 'pregnant women' don't appear in the police," Ketteringham says. "It was a police force meant to protect children from meth labs." I land legislator has filed an amicus cursory, claiming the law was not intended to be used this way, and the Legislature has repeatedly rejected amendments to expand the law's definition of "child" to explicitly mean "fetus." Merely shortly subsequently the law passed, Alabama prosecutors began extending the term "environment" to also mean the "womb," and "child" to also mean "fetus." In 2006, Tiffany Hitson was charged with chemical endangerment the mean solar day later on she gave nascence to a infant girl who tested positive for cocaine and marijuana but was otherwise healthy. When that prosecution was successful (Hitson was incarcerated for a twelvemonth), other counties followed conform, making Alabama the national majuscule for prosecuting women on behalf of their newborn children.
Concluding summertime, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld this expanded interpretation of the chemical-endangerment constabulary, ruling that the dictionary definition of "kid" includes "unborn child," an estimation that volition be challenged when the land'southward Supreme Court considers Kimbrough'south case in the coming months. Simply the implications of that ruling go far beyond Alabama. Critics similar Ketteringham argue that Alabama'south chemical-endangerment police offers a dorsum door into what has go known equally the "fetal personhood" statement.
Personhood USA, an organization based in Colorado, was founded in 2008 by Keith Mason after he became frustrated by the mainstream anti-ballgame movement'south incremental approach of restricting the availability of legal ballgame. "From my perspective, I saw a movement that was largely dying or dead and had a lack of enthusiasm from younger people and from people who had been in the fight for so many years," he told me. "Something had to change. Personhood is that rallying point, because it's the crux of the effect." His motion seeks to establish the fetus'southward right to live as equal to that of the female parent'due south.
Personhood advocates regard fetal rights as a civil rights issue, and they often compare themselves to abolitionists. "I think it would be unequal protection to requite the woman a laissez passer when anyone else who injects drugs into a child would exist prosecuted," Ben DuPré, managing director of Personhood Alabama, said. "What it boils down to is, aren't these petty children persons?"
The goal of Personhood USA is to establish that a fully rights-endowed person is created when sperm meets egg. To that end, it has introduced initiatives and measures in legislatures in 22 states. Though none of these measures take become police force, some, like Proffer 26 in Mississippi, have made it to a election plebiscite, and other measures have passed legislative chambers in Northward Dakota, Montana and Oklahoma. The trouble with those measures, from a legal perspective, says Lynn Paltrow, executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, is that "there is no way to treat fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses as separate constitutional persons without subtracting pregnant women from the community of constitutional persons."
The sometimes vague language of the initiatives and measures masks what would be the "sweeping effects on access to health care," says Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, a staff lawyer for the A.C.L.U.'southward Reproductive Freedom Project. Ane district-courtroom gauge agreed with the A.C.Fifty.U., which brought a adapt to cake a personhood initiative from the election in Nevada. Judge James E. Wilson ordered the sponsor of the country's personhood initiative to add clarifying linguistic communication. As he wrote in his opinion in Dec: "The initiative would protect a prenatal person regardless of whether or not the prenatal person would live, grow, or develop in the womb or survive birth; prevent all abortions even in the example of rape, incest or serious threats to the woman's health or life, or when a woman is suffering from a miscarriage, or as an emergency treatment for an ectopic pregnancy. . . ." The initiative was withdrawn, but signatures are existence gathered on a rewritten petition.
In Mississippi, Proffer 26 would have outlawed abortion, embryonic-stem-cell research, cancer treatments that might injure a fetus and some pop methods of birth control. The measure out was defeated, Paltrow said, "considering its implication was obvious: one time the woman becomes meaning, she has a second-class status in which she loses near every constitutional right, including a right to medical privacy."
"At least Mississippi put it up to a vote," Ketteringham says. In Alabama, "you essentially take a personhood measure in disguise."
Prototype
Critics of Alabama's chemic-endangerment constabulary argue that drug use by pregnant women is best treated as a health issue, not a criminal one. Addiction, they say, can be treated, simply drug users have to be willing to seek assistance, which they might be less likely to do if they fearfulness abort. "To simplify a complex medical and psychosocial result into a criminal issue is really but similar using a hammer to play the pianoforte," says Dr. Deborah Frank, a pediatrician and managing director of Boston Medical Centre's Abound Dispensary for Children. "The whole definition of habit is compulsive behavior in spite of adverse consequences — similar the person who keeps eating doughnuts even though their doctor tells them they're morbidly obese and going to die of a heart attack." Deterrents, experts like Frank say, don't work well when it comes to addicts and may fifty-fifty be counterproductive.
Heather Capps, a 25-twelvemonth-old mother of 3, was arrested in Marshall County, Ala., on November. 11, 2011, two days afterwards giving nativity via Caesarean section to a good for you boy who tested positive for Oxycodone. Capps says that she became addicted to the drug afterwards it was prescribed for her scoliosis pain. When Capps learned she was pregnant, she knew she would exist prosecuted if she gave nativity to a infant who tested positive for drugs, and she also knew that the furnishings of withdrawal from quitting abruptly during pregnancy could be unsafe to her unborn child.
She went online, and afterwards finding the Web site of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, chosen Ketteringham to ask for legal advice. Ketteringham confirmed that if Capps gave birth in Marshall County, she would near likely exist prosecuted and recommended that she hire a lawyer. Capps had heard that prosecutors in nearby Jefferson County weren't bringing chemical-endangerment charges against drug-using pregnant women, merely because she had 2 young sons in school she decided to stay where she was and to continue taking the lowest possible dose of Oxycodone she felt she could manage. She too posted some regrettable things during private Facebook conversations: "I figured since I was only informed that im a crackhead (however wonderin how im the last to find out) and pregnant now ill just shoot thru my bellybutton strait into the uterus to make sure the infant gets high to." That Facebook post, shown on the local news afterward her abort, made her a pariah. Her family insists the post was a cry for aid. "When she was told in that location was no help for her, and that she might lose the baby, she was petrified," her married man, Matthew Devin, says. "She couldn't alive with herself if she hurt one of our kids."
Capps was arrested on the hospital grounds. She remained in jail for three months because her family could not afford to mail service her $500,000 bail. She was then sent to rehab and placed in a halfway house, where she continues to receive handling. If she completes the program to the guess'southward satisfaction, her sentence volition exist dismissed. She is allowed to see her three children once a calendar week on Sundays.
The recommended treatment for opiate addiction during pregnancy is a controlled dosage of methadone, says Dr. Robert Newman, of the International Eye for Advancement of Addiction Treatment at Beth Israel, who says a prognosis for both mother and baby is good with long-term outpatient treatment. (Capps told me that the drug handling she was offered while significant was at an inpatient facility in Birmingham.) Prosecutors I spoke with said they would not charge a woman taking prescribed methadone. Simply the police does not prohibit such a charge, and critics contend that the threat of prosecution discourages women from seeking addiction handling. The American Higher of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued a statement in 2011 cautioning that women would even avoid prenatal intendance when they believed doctors were gathering evidence for police enforcement. Measures similar Alabama'southward chemical-endangerment police force, they said, are "contrary to the welfare of the female parent and fetus." State Senator Clay Scofield of Alabama, who is seeking to improve the state'due south chemical-endangerment law to include the fetus, dismisses this business concern. "The bulk of women who are abusing meth already do not seek prenatal care," he told me.
At that place is anecdotal bear witness to suggest that pregnant women in Alabama, aware that they may exist arrested and their medical records subpoenaed if they or their babies test positive for drugs, may be changing their beliefs — although not necessarily as some prosecutors hoped. Carmen Howell, a defense lawyer in Enterprise, says she knows of 1 adult female who collection to Georgia when she went into labor and another who gave nascence to a iii-pound infant in a bathtub at dwelling. She is concerned that women who use drugs may also exist having abortions to avoid prosecution. This law, she says, "is a deterrent to choosing life."
Final November, I accompanied Kimbrough and Timmy Sr. to Timmy Jr.'due south grave in a well-tended cemetery nigh Kimbrough'due south parents' house. Kimbrough's grandfather was buried nearby; a gravestone portrait shows him driving a John Deere tractor. It was raining, and Kimbrough, shivering in a black turtleneck and jeans, rearranged metallic butterflies, ceramic angels and a plastic cantankerous until Timmy Sr. called out from their truck, "Are y'all trying to go a cold?"
The funeral had been modest. "We only done close family," Kimbrough had told me earlier. "I had a closed catafalque for my older kids cause he was and then purple. I recall about it every day. To me, that'southward penalization enough."
"Don't upset yourself, now," Timmy Sr. said. He pushed back his slicked-back hair, revealing an upper-arm tattoo of a cross above which is written "Amanda."
"People expect to her real bad," he said. "I don't know why they want to make out like she washed it on purpose or something. United states losing information technology and all was enough for me and her both. Them wanting to send her to prison house for information technology, that just own't right." Timmy Sr., who is 22 years older than his wife, and whom she affectionately calls "Bro," told me that he once had problem with meth, likewise. Only, he said, he "did a 180" when he met Kimbrough. "I been to rehab," he said. "It's a disease."
Back at home, Kimbrough went into her bedroom and came out with a white box containing knitted socks and an banner of Timmy Jr.'southward foot on paper. Neatly folded in a bag labeled with his birth date was Timmy Jr.'s hospital blanket decorated with a teddy-bear affections. "There was ane nurse who sat and talked to me," Kimbrough said. "She was the only i who was really good to me. When they brought the infant in there, they acted like I didn't hold him long plenty. Who wants to hold a dead baby, you know?" she continued, apologetically. "I held him for about 10 minutes."
When I drove up to the address that Promise Ankrom gave me, I assumed I must accept entered it incorrectly into the motorcar's GPS. Information technology was a palatial house in an upscale community with an 18-pigsty golf course. Ankrom was one of the first women to be prosecuted under Alabama's chemic-endangerment police. Near women against whom chemical-endangerment charges are brought are poor, defense lawyers say. But Ankrom'southward married man is an aircraft mechanic who makes six figures working as a contractor in Afghanistan. This house, which belongs to Ankrom's parents, a retired Army colonel and a nurse, is about a five-hour bulldoze south of Kimbrough'south domicile, and probably worth 10 times equally much.
At 29, Ankrom seems like a mischievous teenager. She wore dangly silver earrings, a brown T-shirt, jeans and boots. Her three children (Bryson, now three; Aubree, 4; and Paige, v) raced around the living room in a blur of curly dark hair and sippy cups. She yelled at Bryson to come up dorsum from the open front end door and helped Paige alter from flip-flops to sneakers, then shooed all three children out the door to back-trail their granddaddy to McDonald's.
"Listen: silence," she said with a grinning. Bryson, she told me, was born weighing almost six pounds. He was healthy only tested positive for marijuana and cocaine. Ankrom admits smoking pot but denies cocaine use. She said that she quit smoking pot for her outset 2 pregnancies, but that during the 3rd, her morning sickness was relentless. Marijuana kept her functional, she said, and so she continued in spite of her gynecologist'due south warning that she faced prosecution if she did not end. She planned to quit a few weeks before her due engagement, bold that she would then exam negative. But Bryson came half-dozen weeks early.
When Bryson'southward drug-examination results came back, the infirmary called the Department of Homo Resources, Alabama'southward child-protection service, which placed her children in the custody of her parents. "The first nighttime without my children, I thought I was just going to die," Ankrom said. She moved in with her parents so she could exist effectually her children, but she was not allowed to be alone with them.
Two weeks later, the police came to the door with a warrant.
"Since I was chest-feeding, they allow me pump a few times before they took me to jail," Ankrom said. They handcuffed her, walked her to the machine in front of her parents' neighbors so took her to a holding cell, where she spent a few hours before her parents posted bail. "Boy, did I leak while I was in in that location!" she said with a laugh. "I had toilet paper crammed in my bra. There is nada more painful than needing to limited and not beingness able to."
For several months Ankrom received regular, unannounced spot checks to brand sure she wasn't lone with whatsoever of her children. A friend moved in to supervise her when her parents weren't home. Ankrom pleaded guilty to chemical endangerment and was given a suspended sentence with one twelvemonth's probation. She completed mandatory drug handling and continues to attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings for what she describes every bit a marijuana addiction. "I really screwed up," she said. "I can't blame anybody but myself."
Ankrom at present stays home with the children full time. Even if they don't demand the money, she said, she wishes she could work. Only the guilty plea has made that more difficult. "What'south killing me is I had a bright future," said Ankrom, who was studying to be a physical-therapy banana. "When you desire to work with children or the elderly, they meet that corruption charge and they're similar: 'Whoa, no, thanks, ma'am. Y'all're not going to work here.' "
Ankrom said she had picayune expectation that her circumstances would alter, though Alabama's Supreme Courtroom will hear her case forth with Kimbrough's. "I'm not holding my breath on the Supreme Court overturning it," she said. "I am guilty. I did smoke pot. I fabricated bad decisions." She shrugged. "It is how it is."
Ankrom'due south lawyer, Carmen Howell, who represented her before the Court of Criminal Appeals (which upheld Ankrom's and Kimbrough'southward convictions this past summer), is pressing on with the appeal pro bono considering, she said, the implications of the law are "scary." She questioned what the arrest was really almost if Ankrom could be prosecuted for drug use fifty-fifty though her child was unharmed.
Epitome
"I think what you lot're looking at here is a failure to understand that addiction is a affliction of the encephalon," says Dr. Barry Lester, the director of the Center for the Report of Children at Run a risk at Brown University. "You are looking at people who think that these are horrible women who are rationally, willfully pain their kids, but it'southward more complicated than that. Science has shown that addiction is a disease similar whatsoever other mental illness, and admittedly treatable."
Prosecutors often compare doing drugs while meaning to driving while drunk. A offense has still been committed, they say, even when there is no harm done. Mitch Floyd, a passionate 42-twelvemonth-old from Albertville — office of an area known as Meth Mountain — has prosecuted chemical-endangerment cases against new mothers more aggressively than anyone else. He is a patient, friendly human with low-cal eyes who becomes mortiferous serious when he talks virtually babies.
Habit is "a very powerful force," he told me. "However, there's a forcefulness that's more powerful than that to me, and that is a child is helpless, and God has put one person on this planet to be the last-line defense, to be the fiercest protector of that kid, and that is its mother. My married woman would literally hook someone's eyes out — fight you to the death for our children. I mean, that'due south merely what mothers are supposed to do. When that child'due south ultimate protector is the one causing the harm, what do you practice?"
Over breakfast at a hotel eating place in Florence, Ala., he shared photos of babies involved in some of his cases. Many looked healthy, although he said they were tiny and had all been exposed to drugs. One, built-in in February 2007, was shown in a neonatal-intensive-intendance unit with a man's wedding ring hanging effectually her wrist similar a bangle. Another, born in August 2008, was expressionless and purple, his hands crossed over his breast.
"I meant to take that one out," he said.
Floyd says he is committed to drug-abuse prevention because, through his own work every bit an assistant district attorney and that of his married woman, who works for the Department of Human Resource, he has seen firsthand the destruction of drugs on families. He visits local high schools and community groups to encourage teenagers to stay off meth, and insists the primary goal of these chemical-endangerment prosecutions is to keep more babies from being exposed to drugs. The mothers who are convicted, he says, are put in rehab and helped in the long run. "It's a shame that babies demand to be protected from their own mothers, only sometimes they practise, and that'due south our job," Floyd said. "Information technology upsets me and offends me at the same time.
"People tin argue with information technology," he added, referring to his chemical-endangerment prosecutions, "just I think nosotros've been very successful. We want folks to non reoffend, to get clean, to go reunited. I think that'south the all-time-case scenario."
No one would suggest that meaning women should use drugs. But at that place are scientists who say that methamphetamines do not take a long-term touch on a developing fetus. Dr. Carl L. Hart, an acquaintance professor of psychiatry and psychology at Columbia University and a inquiry scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Plant, says that heavy alcohol use is potentially far more serious than a mother's utilise of opiates, cocaine or meth, considering while these harder drugs may result in preterm labor or withdrawal symptoms that demand to be managed, few babies experience long-term effects. Babies with fetal-booze syndrome, by dissimilarity, are probable to accept lifelong physical, mental and emotional problems, including significantly delayed brain development.
Furthermore, attributing a babe's medical condition to the presence of a unmarried drug tin can be difficult, because many women who use illegal drugs take other risk factors at play during their pregnancies. "Poor nutrition, smoking, drinking, homelessness, poverty. . . . How exercise you command for all that?" Dr. Stephen Kandall, a neonatologist and the author of "Substance and Shadow: Women and Addiction in the United States," told me.
Floyd'south message, however, is clear and uncomplicated: drug employ during pregnancy is unsafe and criminal. In Jan, he announced he would run for Marshall County district judge and campaigned in the Republican primary in part on his chemical-endangerment prosecutions. One ad featured a local obstetrician praising Floyd's piece of work on behalf of the county'south children, "born and unborn." Floyd, the doc says, "makes certain these women are jailed and the babies are placed in a safety home." Another advertisement showed a woman named Whitney Holsonback holding her babe and smiling. "Mitch Floyd made sure I went to jail," it read, "simply allowed me to go to drug handling." With his help, she says in the advertisement, she was able to turn her life around. Now, she's off drugs, in nursing school and able to exist a proficient mother to her son. "Mitch was tough on me," she says, "but he besides cared most me; he encouraged me."
On March 13, Floyd won in a landslide.
Laws concerning a meaning woman's treatment of her fetus are not without precedent. Since abortion was legalized in 1973, hundreds of women across the state take been arrested for harming their fetuses, with charges ranging from child endangerment to beginning-caste murder.
Many of these prosecutions originate in laws initially designed to build in extra penalties when pregnant women are victims of a offense. Fetal-homicide laws, for example, which are on the books in 39 states, take oftentimes been passed in response to a brutal killing. Alabama'southward fetal-homicide police force is known equally the Brody Neb, named after the fetus who died in the 2005 murder of his mother, Brandy Parker. But treating women and their fetuses as carve up persons under the law can have unexpected consequences. A adult female in Indiana, Bei Bei Shuai, is at present in prison for a suicide endeavour that resulted in the death of her fetus. Three years ago in Mississippi, Rennie Gibbs had a stillbirth shortly later on turning 16. When her baby tested positive for cocaine, she was charged with a "depraved heart murder," the legal term for a killing with "a callous disregard for human life," which in Mississippi carries a life sentence without possibility of parole until the age of 65. The Mississippi Land Supreme Court, after initially agreeing to weigh in on the case, abruptly reconsidered, maxim Gibbs should stand up trial earlier it would rule on whether the constabulary applies to pregnant women. Alabama'southward fetal-homicide law exempts pregnant women.
Measures that specifically define fetuses as persons take failed in every state in which they have been introduced (Colorado voters rejected fetal-personhood initiatives twice), but Mason, the founder of Personhood USA, told me that he isn't deterred. The goal, he said, is to heighten awareness, much as gay marriage advocates, with whom he disagrees, have done with their campaigns. "The more we raise the outcome, the more we change the culture," he said. Troy Newman, president of the anti-abortion group Functioning Rescue, agrees, in part, saying: "Is information technology a winning strategy? Evidently not. They've spent millions of dollars in at to the lowest degree two different states running initiatives, and they've all failed miserably." On the other hand, laws similar chemical endangerment, he says, could ultimately get the anti-ballgame motion where it wants to go. "Expect," he says, "nosotros win every time we establish the precedent that the unborn kid in the womb is a unique human being private."
Mathew D. Staver, the founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, who helped get fetal personhood on the ballot in Mississippi, recently filed an amicus brief with the State Supreme Courtroom supporting the country'due south case against Ankrom. Staver told me by phone that "it'southward articulate that history has sided with the idea that life begins in the womb. The merely abnormality is Roe v. Wade. Abortion laws are an island unto themselves, and that island is gradually shrinking."
But the expansion of fetal-homicide and chemical-endangerment laws take some people on the other side of the contend reaching for their copies of "The Handmaid'south Tale," Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel in which women are enslaved as childbearers.
"Nosotros're heading toward this Margaret Atwood-like society," Ketteringham says. "The idea that the country needs to threaten and punish women and then that they exercise the right thing during pregnancy is appalling. Everyone talks almost the personhood of the fetus, but what's really at stake is the personhood of women. It starts with the apply of an illegal drug, merely what happens as a result of that precedent is that everything a woman does while she's significant becomes subject to state regulation.
"Information technology starts with cocaine, so it'due south cigarettes and alcohol. How much alcohol? And when? Information technology'southward only a matter of time until it comes to refusing a bed-rest order because you lot need to work and take care of your other children then yous have a miscarriage. What if you stay at a job where you're exposed to toxic chemicals, every bit at a dry cleaner? What if y'all keep taking your Southward.S.R.I.'south during pregnancy? If a woman is told that sexual practice during her pregnancy could be a take chances to the fetus, and the woman has sex anyhow and miscarries, are you lot going to prosecute the woman — and the man too?"
"[The fetus] is some other human beingness, just like we are," Scofield, the state senator, says. "I look at the tens of millions of good mothers who make the right decisions. My mother, for instance, smoked forever. The day she plant out she was meaning with me, she put downward her cigarettes for the concluding time. If we plough our dorsum on this, we say to all these good mothers who have fabricated good decisions that it's meaningless to guild to be a skillful mother or a good father."
Despite the mother-hen domesticity I witnessed, Amanda Kimbrough has not proved to be a model examination-case accused. Three months after I met her in Russellville, she was back in jail. Her appeal bail was revoked when she was charged with selling Oxycodone to a confidential informant. Timmy Sr. called the arrest a "setup." David Henry Neal, the lawyer representing her on the new charge, said he would enter a non-guilty plea if there was an indictment. "We just hope that the system volition non endeavor to get its pound of flesh over the decease of the baby through the new drug charge," says Brian White, i of her lawyers in the chemical-endangerment example.
Only an investigator in the Franklin County sheriff's office, who asked not to be named because he was not permitted to speak to the press, told me that his office had been monitoring Kimbrough for a long time: "The important thing is the safety of the kids. She'southward not an innocent person if she's already in trouble and done that to her infant and she'due south notwithstanding out selling dope."
Her lawyers were clearly disappointed by the new arrest, but given their experience working with defendants, non entirely surprised. "No instance is ever piece of cake," Ketteringham told me. "People are complicated." Kimbrough's drug history, her lawyers acknowledge, may brand it difficult to empathize with her. Only, they say, moral outrage demand non be accompanied by legal punishment. "Peradventure human beings have non evolved enough to agree the complex thought that many things can be truthful at the aforementioned fourth dimension," Paltrow of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women says. "We tin can feel a sure mode. We tin can value the unborn as a matter of religion, ethics or experience, but we can't practise that as a matter of law and still value pregnant women."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/magazine/the-criminalization-of-bad-mothers.html
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