Gearing up to take newborn babies away from addicted mothers!

[buttershots21]

By no means do I think mothers should do drugs while they are pregnant. Of course not! All this will accomplish is mothers not getting any prenatal care at all and having their babies at home so they don't get taken away by CPS. Smoke weed and lose your kid. The worst part is that if the baby is addicted to crack or opiates or meth, the babies will be going through god awful withdrawls at home, cold turkey, with no help, when if they are hospital born they get weaned off of the drug. As always, these laws do more harm than good. Only when they start treating addiction as an illness instead of a criminal act will true progress be made! All these threats and scare tactics do is make the problem worse not better! And now infant death rates will go up because babies can die from cold turkey withdrawals!
<div id="fb-root"></div> <script>(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));</script>
<div class="fb-post" data-href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152284670648468&set=a.299256603467.142545.61401738467&type=1" data-width="466"><div class="fb-xfbml-parse-ignore"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152284670648468&set=a.299256603467.142545.61401738467&type=1">Post</a> by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/kobfm">93.3 KOB-FM</a>.</div></div>



Sorry, I'm not the best at links and whatnot

 

[_DankOpiAmp_]

This would almost make sense if foster homes were not so notoriously demented. I watched a Young Turks episode about a family whose daughter was taken to one after the father admitted to smoking pot after she went to bed. The daughter ended up being killed by the foster parent and there were still people blaming the father's "selfish" drug use for her death in the comments.

Warning: link script is fucked and didn't show up properly^

 

[Jabberwocky]

Here's another link/article on this abso-fucking-lutely disgusting trend: http://thefix.com/content/tennessee-slated-punish-drug-addicted-pregnant-women-prison-time I guess the state never got the memo this old-school punitive approach never worked...

Tennessee Passes Legislation to Criminally Prosecute Drug-Addicted Pregnant Women

Tennessee's legislature gave its approval a bill that would criminalize some drug-addicted pregnant women, depending on the outcome of their pregnancy. The bill, if signed into law, would allow prosecutors to charge a woman with an "assaultive offense or homicide" if she takes illegal narcotics during her pregnancy, if "the child is born addicted, is harmed, or dies because of the drug." The bill would reverse the state's earlier abandonment of the provision in favor of a more compassionate approach to drug addiction and pregnancy. The House approved the bill 64-30 on Wednesday afternoon, a day after it passed the state Senate.

Many critics of the bill, and others like it, argue that the measure would open the door to a broader effort to criminalize women who engage in behaviors that potentially place a fetus at risk — like failing to follow the recommendations of a doctor. Bill sponsor and state Rep. Terri Weaver said in a floor debate on Thursday that her bill was intended to encourage women to "get help" for their addiction. "This piece of legislation is an intervention," she said, adding "Do you want help for yourself, and do you want help for the baby who is inside your womb, or not?"

Under the amended version of the bill passed today, the threat of charges goes away if a woman voluntarily enters in to an approved treatment program. Although that added provision helped to moderate some state-based opposition to the bill, Salon notes that most major medical associations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, believe that the measure would discourage women with drug addictions from seeking prenatal care (and therefore risk discovery) in the first place.

Tennessee had a similar criminal penalty to Weaver's proposal in place until two years ago, when the state eliminated it in favor of more treatment-based solutions. Under the current rules, pregnant women in Tennessee are protected from prosecution until a fetus is "viable," or at about 24 weeks. As the Tennessean reported, the state's Safe Harbor Act went into effect last year, offering a litany of incentives to help women access treatment. Although the state has one year of data on the program, advocates say that's not enough time to demonstrate its effectiveness. As of late last year, the rate of drug-addicted births was increasing in the state.

Currently, 17 states, including Tennessee, consider drug use during pregnancy to be child abuse under civil child welfare statutes, according to the Guttmacher institute. Three states allow for "civil commitment" of pregnant women with drug habits — for instance, forced admission to an inpatient treatment program. No states currently have laws like the ones Tennessee proposed on the books, explicitly allowing a state to bring criminal charges against a pregnant woman because of a drug habit's potential or confirmed effect on a fetus. But some states have tried and succeeded in bring those charges, anyway, Guttmacher notes, relying on existing laws that don't pertain specifically to drug use in pregnant women.

Those attempts had a couple victories in the state courts: a South Carolina Supreme Court decision agreed that drug use during late pregnancy is criminal child abuse under state law. In 2012, the New York Times documented Alabama law enforcement's use of a child endangerment law intended to apply to meth labs to prosecute and jail drug-addicted pregnant women. In 2013, the Alabama Supreme Court agreed with this interpretation of the law.

Even in Tennessee, officials have tried to prosecute pregnant women for drug abuse despite their explicit protection under the law. A WBIR investigation documented a bunch of such cases since the earlier criminal provision was removed from the books. Earlier this summer, Memphis police attempted to prosecute a pregnant woman with a DUI even though her blood alcohol content was well under the legal limit, because she told law enforcement officials that she was four months pregnant.

http://www.thewire.com/politics/201...rosecute-drug-addicted-pregnant-women/360424/

This whole mother's-an-addict/dependent-on-drugs-then-the-kid-will-be is bullshit. Children being born dependent on drugs because their mother was are the exception and not the rule when it comes to mothers-to-be using drugs. This would set a disgusting precedent, and the sickest part is that it'll probably get put into law... The fact the AMA supports this, while it doesn't suprise me given it's early history, should serve as a wake up call to anyone who naively believed in the medical community's well-meaning practices when it comes to "addiction" and "helping" "addicts." Should be recognized as what it is - really nothing more than the maintenance of the status quo and the established medical community and modern medicine. Despite it's huge achievements, modern medicine is a pretty coercive, controlling and often draconian set of institutions. Keep in mind I'm not even a liberatarian, so I'm not just toeing any line about unfettered individual freedom or anything here... it goes beyond that, not that individual rights and liberties are not important. If anything, I'm a communitarian, although that political ideology doesn't exist in this country in any really meaningful way whatsoever. Michael Sandel (kinda dick tho), Michael Walzer (my hero), Michael Blo (handsome asshat), good shit. But I digress...

 

[slimvictor]

Wow.
Nobody should use recreational drugs while pregnant.
But taking children away from parents is a pretty severe step.
Would they take the children away from a thief, rapist, murderer?
No, they are allowed to keep their kids, and be with them after they get out of jail.
Something is terribly wrong here.

 

[What 23]

^perspective not lost.
Government on the other hand...

 

[_DankOpiAmp_]

I'm assuming they still don't prosecute when the mother uses the only drug that actually causes measurable damage to the fetus, alcohol.

 

[ro4eva]

I'm assuming they still don't prosecute when the mother uses the only drug that actually causes measurable damage to the fetus, alcohol.

I doubt it. And if they don't, it's yet another reason why these "quick fix" laws for surprisingly complex, long-lasting issues are causing more harm than good. But that's probably the point. The problems caused will generate jobs, and of course, lots of money. The people who suffer as a result will be left to rot.

The people who write these bills are usually thinking the following: "How can I make money off of this? What's in it for me? I want my cut. Don't care if some junkie suffers because of it."

I'd love to see what would happen if the "drug warrior" bureaucrats pushing this shit would be forced to submit a random urine sample to the DEA without any warning whatsoever. How many of them would test positive for an illicit substance? Fuckers.