Cynthia L. Cooper wrote this story about the continuing bad news from family courts for WomensEnews.org.
At the same time that Colorado opened its doors to the legal sale of marijuana on Jan. 1 and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo
proposed loosening marijuana laws, there's a different reality for many pregnant and parenting women caught consuming drugs.
In the curtained world of family courts and child service protection agencies, women across the country face punishments for drug use. These include removal of children to foster care, repeated visits by government employees, home searches, mandated drug tests, unwanted court appearances and even forced detention. These reprisals may be noncriminal, but they are nonetheless bruising and burdensome.
While the public appetite for drug reform has grown, the situation for women with children has worsened in the past decade, in part because of a little-noticed law from the George W. Bush administration that redefines child harm from parental drug use. A parent's use of drugs and even mere possession can be considered "child endangerment" under sweeping language, peppered with a dictionary of newly crafted terms such as "substance-exposed infants" or SEIs and "drug-endangered children" or DECs.
Those most affected are the economically distressed and women of color.
Comments (0)