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An Alabama woman was imprisoned for ‘endangering’ her fetus. She gave birth in a jail shower
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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The way the detention staff acted in this is frankly disgusting. That being said, I don't think it is entirely fair to equate Alabama's frankly stupid abortion legislation with assigning a certain level of rights to a foetus. If a mother intends to carry to full term and is using drugs, I don't think it is fair to the foetus-soon-to-be-person to ignore this.
Who here would like to try and explain to a victim of foetal alcohol syndrome or prenatal opioid exposure that their suffering is morally acceptable because their mother had the right to choose?
It doesn't always need to be one extreme or another, there is a middle ground.
I disagree whole heartedly. Criminalizing things like using drugs during pregnancy leads to criminalizing miscarriages for natural reasons which has absolutely happened. There's not a ton of cases, but women have gone to jail for having a miscarriage after saying they wanted an abortion based on the idea that they must have killed their fetus.
I don't care about prosecuting or criminalising in this case. There is already precedent for rehabilitation both voluntary, and in the case where a person's safety is at risk, involuntary.
I don't see why this could not be expanded to include the safety of an unborn child.
Noting specifically that I am talking about drug abuse where a woman intends to carry to term, not about locking women up to force them to give birth. I hate that I even have to clarify, but if experience had taught me anything, people on social media get positively orgasmic when they find something they can willfully misinterpret.
Disgusting but not surprising
I agree. If your goal is to give birth, it feels like the fetus becomes a person. Otherwise, 20 to 24weeks, in my opinion, is the reasonable time a fetus could become a person as it is in that period that the conscious experience starts to appear.
The mother in this story was 2 months pregnant when she was arrested, so about eight weeks. I've searched for every other news story on this I could find and none of them say when she became aware she became pregnant and whether or not she used drugs after that, so it's quite likely she didn't have a goal of giving birth here.
That's a different case, everything in the news article and lawsuit happened in 2021 but this one from the sheriff's page is from 2022
Assuming it's the same person and the sheriff's office is being truthful, it doesn't look like any of these awful events did anything to protect her children or stop her drug addiction
So it's your contention she was incarcerated in 2021 for conduct she engaged in during 2022? Because that seems like a violation of the Constitution, along with like laws of physics, but I really just don't understand what point you're trying to make here.
The comment I was responding to said [paraphrased] "if your goal is to give birth and you use drugs when you know you're pregnant that should be a crime." I just pointed out that we don't know if she knew she was 2 months pregnant in March 2021 when she was arrested, resulting in this jailhouse shower birth in October 2021. Whatever she's alleged to have done in 2022 and any arrests that resulted from that doesn't have anything to do with that question.
Yeah, it's definitely possible. She was arrested after failing a drug test, they probably did the pregnancy test then too and that could have been how/when she found out she was pregnant.