20 October 2023

Pregnant in Alabama

From a report in The Guardian:
In March 2021, sheriffs in Etowah county, Alabama, arrested Ashley Caswell on accusations that she’d tested positive for methamphetamine while pregnant and was “endangering” her fetus.

Caswell, who was two months pregnant at the time, became one of a growing number of women imprisoned in the county in the name of protecting their “unborn children”.

But over the next seven months of incarceration for “chemical endangerment” in the Etowah county detention center (ECDC), Caswell was denied regular access to prenatal visits, even as officials were aware her pregnancy was high-risk due to her hypertension and abnormal pap smears, according to a lawsuit filed on Friday against the county and the sheriff’s department. She was also denied her prescribed psychiatric medication and slept on a thin mat on the concrete floor of the detention center for her entire pregnancy.

In October, when her water broke and she pleaded to be taken to a hospital, her lawyer says, officials told her to “sleep it off” and “wait until Monday” to deliver – two days away.

During nearly 12 hours of labor, staff gave her only Tylenol for her pain, the suit says, allegedly telling her to “stop screaming”, to “deal with the pain” and that she was “not in full labor”. Caswell lost amniotic fluid and blood and was alone and standing up in a jail shower when she ultimately delivered her child, according to the complaint and her medical records. She nearly bled to death, her lawyers say...

Data suggests the county is the national leader in arresting women under the guise of protecting their fetuses...  The group logged 649 cases in which women in the state were arrested or faced other criminal consequences in the name of protecting their fetuses or to punish actions that authorities said endangered their pregnancies.

11 comments:

  1. Who would have predicted that, The South Will Rise Again would come not from rebel yells but Christian Authoritarianism? Anyone? Everyone?

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  2. We're going to vote soon as to whether Ohio will be like Alabama and honestly it terrifies me. I keep thinking of the pictures of the Iranian women from the 1970s, living their normal lives. It feels almost unstoppable sometimes. Like soon I won't have any rights at all. I vote but in a state as gerrymandered as mine, it doesn't seem to matter.

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  3. I don't know why anyone's surprised. After all, the headline said "Alabama."

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    1. I was just going to comment this, exactly. You beat me to it, but it deserves repeating... "what else do you expect from Alabama?"

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  4. Decades ago in the Whole Earth Review, or one of its earlier incarnations, there was an essay pointing out that if a fetus is granted legal rights & status, lawyers could now be used to sue the polluters that have caused the rise in infant & child cancers that is now occurring. Still waiting for that idea to blossom.

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  5. Can someone ask these Etowah Co sheriffs how they have protected this fetus? And why the right of this fetus are somehow more important than the rights of a woman?

    I mean, aside from the bullshit about fetal personhood, these misogynists have basically denied this woman's personhood.

    What strikes me about all this is that I honestly do not understand what the point is. Is you want to protect the fetus, this is not the way to do it.

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    1. I wouldn't think the sheriffs have any sincere focus on protecting the fetus. Their purpose is to punish the woman.

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    2. I agree that's what they end up doing.

      But I wonder what they think they're doing.

      They're not protecting the fetus. They're not protecting life. Are they just sadists?

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  6. The most charitable explanation I can think of, and it isn't very, is encapsulated in this quote from C.S.Lewis: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

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    1. https://therepublicanstandard.substack.com/p/cs-lewis-on-the-tyranny-of-good-intentions

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    2. damn, that's on point, good for you anon, for know that one

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