In Tennessee earlier this month, police arrested Mallory Loyola and charged her with assault for using methamphetamines while pregnant under a new state law, SB 1391, which criminalizes illegal narcotic use during pregnancy. Tennessee’s law joins a larger movement of “personhood laws” being written into law in states across the country, which consider fertilized eggs, embryos or fetuses people and thus allow for the criminalization of pregnant women for drug use on the premise that it violates the unborn fetus’s rights.
In a recent piece for the Washington Post, Deborah Jiang-Stein, who was born addicted to heroin, writes that the new Tennessee law “simply feeds a pipeline of foster care, and does nothing to treat the core problem of addiction.” Many worry that laws like Tennessee’s will discourage women who are using drugs from seeking medical or prenatal care for fear of criminal charges.
“Really, the law sentences two generations at a time and continues a cycle of trauma,” writes Jiang-Stein.
[For more of this story, written by Sophie Lee, go to http://www.dailycal.org/2014/07/31/breaking-cycles-trauma-lives/]
Comments (0)