Chemical endangerment of a child. The Alabama law, passed in 2006, was intended to target those who expose children to toxic chemicals, or worse, explosions, while manufacturing methamphetamine in ad-hoc home labs.
In Etowah County, in 2013, the sheriff, the district attorney, and the head of the local child-welfare agency held a press conference to announce they intended to aggressively enforce that 2006 law. Instead of going after the manufacturers of meth, though, they planned to target pregnant women who used virtually any substance they deemed harmful to a developing fetus.
"If a baby is born with a controlled-substance dependency, the mother is going to jail," then-Sheriff Todd Entrekin said at the time. Police weren't required to establish that a child was born with a chemical dependency, though--or even that a fetus experienced any harm--a drug test, a confession, or just an accusation of substance use during pregnancy was enough to arrest women for a first offense that carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. One public defender would later call these "unwinnable cases."
Over the following decade, Etowah County imprisoned hundreds of mothers--some of whom were detained, before trial, for the rest of their pregnancies, inside one of the most brutal and inhumane prisons in the country, denied access to prenatal care and adequate nutrition, they say--in the name of protecting their children from harm.
Etowah County officials didn't come up with this idea themselves. They borrowed it from a district attorney who began testing the limits of the chemical-endangerment law years earlier in a different part of the state. Steve Marshall's theory--which essentially treats the uterus as a home meth lab, and the fetus a living child--was appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court. In 2013, the justices declared the term "child" included embryos at any stage of development, marking the first time a state Supreme Court anywhere in the United States recognized that embryos and fetuses had legal rights before the point of viability.
In the past two decades, Alabama has become the undisputed champion of arresting pregnant women for actions that wouldn't be considered crimes if they weren't pregnant: 649 arrests between 2006 and 2022, almost as many arrests as documented in all other states combined, according to advocacy group Pregnancy Justice, which collected the statistics. Across the U.S., the vast majority of women arrested on these charges were too poor to afford a lawyer, and a quarter of cases were based on the use of a legal substance, like prescription medication.
