Hospitals across the United States have been reporting mothers to child welfare authorities and law enforcement after they tested positive for medications commonly used during childbirth, medications the hospital itself prescribed.
This is a concerning trend highlighted in recent reports, including one from The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the country's criminal justice system.
In one case outlined in the report, Amairani Salinas was 32 weeks pregnant with her fourth child when she visited a hospital in Texas and was told that the baby no longer had a heartbeat. The hospital prescribed her midazolam, a benzodiazepine, to keep her calm while she was being prepared to undergo an emergency cesarean section.
Salinas was still holding her stillborn baby the next day when a social welfare worker visited her room and told her she was being reported to authorities after a drug test found traces of benzodiazepine in her system.
Other Cases Outlined in Reports
Salinas' case is one of the many outlined in reports. Victoria Villanueva was pregnant at 41 weeks with her first child when she visited a hospital in Indiana to have her labor induced. Doctors at the hospital prescribed her narcotics for pain while she was having her contractions. These narcotics would later be the reason why social workers would visit her a day later and prevent her from bonding with her newborn.
It is important to note that Villanueva's drug tests during prenatal visits and right before she went into labor all showed she had no drugs in her system. The morphine she had been given had also been written in her medical records.
Other similar cases were reported in Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, New York, and South Carolina, where child abuse and neglect laws have been expanded to include the conduct of pregnant women.
Prosecuting Mothers Who Suffer Miscarriages
In addition to drug use, pregnant women have also been increasingly prosecuted for pregnancy loss since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
In one case, a mother suffered a miscarriage between 15 and 17 weeks gestation. She was sentenced to four years in prison despite a state medical examiner testifying during a trial that the miscarriage was caused by a complication with the placenta and that the fetus had a congenital abnormality. The state medical examiner could not say for certain whether drug use led to the pregnancy loss.
In 2023 alone, prosecutors had at least 210 cases where they charged people with crimes related to pregnancy, miscarriage, or birth, per Pregnancy Justice US. In most cases, the women were charged with child abuse or neglect. Other charges included homicide, drug-related crimes, abuse of corpse, and abortion-related crimes.
In 191 charges, the prosecutors did not seek proof of harm.
