Pregnant Woman Forced Into Drug-Treatment Program Despite Being Drug-Free. Only Her Fetus Got a Lawy

Pregnant Woman Forced Into Drug-Treatment Program Despite Being Drug-Free. Only Her Fetus Got a Lawyer.

By Amanda Marcotte

While the United States hasn't yet devolved to throwing women in jail for miscarrying like El Salvador has, the anti-abortion movement's attempt to criminalize pregnancy with "fetal endangerment" laws is already leading to arrests here at home. The New York Times reported this week on a federal lawsuit, the first of its kind, filed against Wisconsin on behalf of 28-year-old Alicia Beltran, challenging a 1998 law that allows the police to detain a pregnant woman suspected of using illegal drugs or alcohol and who refuses treatment. The lawyers arguing Beltran's case say that the law violates constitutional rights such as due process and the right to medical privacy.

They couldn't have asked for a better plaintiff, particularly to argue that these laws are applied selectively, often based less on actual drug use and more on doctor and police prejudices against women of color, single mothers, and the working poor. Reports the Times:

She was 14 weeks pregnant and thought she had done the right thing when, at a prenatal checkup, she described a pill addiction the previous year and said she had ended it on her own — something later verified by a urine test. But now an apparently skeptical doctor and a social worker accused her of endangering her unborn child because she had refused to accept their order to start on an anti-addiction drug.

Ms. Beltran, 28, was taken in shackles before a family court commissioner who, she says, brushed aside her pleas for a lawyer. To her astonishment, the court had already appointed a legal guardian for the fetus.