Alabama's Total Abortion Ban and the Red Flag You Missed

[WhiskeyGrinder]

This article ties in with what I said earlier today in this thread: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212101904. That people on the margins have been serving as the red flags and the privileges many of us carry will not protect us.

https://rewire.news/article/2019/05/16/alabamas-total-abortion-ban-red-flag-you-missed

In 2006, Alabama passed a law creating a new crime—chemical endangerment of a minor. This law was meant to protect children from exposure to drugs, drug paraphernalia, or drug manufacturing. Though nowhere in this law (or anywhere else in the Alabama criminal code) were fetuses defined as potential victims of crime, after it went into effect, prosecutors around the state started using it to charge pregnant people who tested positive for drugs. If someone lost a pregnancy and tested positive for a controlled substance, they would be charged with a class A felony.

In 2013, the Alabama Supreme Court heard an appeal of these charges and decided that, from the moment of conception, pregnant people could be held legally accountable for endangering their pregnancies with potentially hazardous substances. Knowledge of the pregnancy was irrelevant. Essentially, with a single case, the Alabama Supreme Court introduced the “personhood” of fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses into the criminal code. As Grace found in her doctoral research, hundreds of women have been charged with this crime—most of them low-income.

This is a harmful political decision on the part of the legislature, and the response from people across the country protesting it is reasonable. However, we did not see this reaction in 2013, though the stakes were arguably similar. Pregnant women were made an exception, being held uniquely legally accountable for things that other people are not punished for. This is true of drug use (not possession, sales, manufacture, but simple use) and soon, it may be true of abortion as well.

Then, as now, pregnant people were the canaries in the coal mines of the erosion of civil rights, but it was a warning too many people missed. The reproductive justice framework, developed by Black women organizing for reproductive health and social justice, has demanded the centering of marginalized people and a more expansive approach to our understanding of reproductive health matters for 25 years. Have you heard the call?

[Hassler]

1. I call it the "forced-labor" industry because like all forced labor, it's slavery.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. And as with all oppressions, it picks off the most vulnerable first, and relies on the complacency

of those who are left.

[Solly Mack]

3. K&R Happening before 2006.

https://www.reproductiverights.org/sites/default/files/documents/pub_bp_punishingwomen.pdf

[WhiskeyGrinder]

4. Yep -- this article was specific to Alabama, but you're right -- these laws don't just pop up out of

nowhere. There are always lots of flags -- and a lot of people who are willing to ignore them, for a variety of reasons.

[Solly Mack]

6. So true.

[delisen]

5. Important connection.

There have been similar harassing prosecutions and attempted prosecutions of women in other states also, from Tennessee to New York.

[KT2000]

7. I would love to see

this law used for toxic chemicals that pregnant women are forced to be exposed to - pesticides, herbicides, diesel fumes, hormone disrupting chemicals, etc. These things are everywhere and affect the development of the fetus.

Hold those who manufacture and use these products accountable with 99 year sentences.