We’re investigative journalists reporting on pregnancy criminalization. We discovered more than 70,000 cases of parents being reported to law enforcement over allegations — sometimes false — of substance use during pregnancy. Ask us anything!

We’re investigative journalists reporting on pregnancy criminalization. We discovered more than 70,000 cases of parents being reported to law enforcement over allegations — sometimes false — of substance use during pregnancy. Ask us anything!

Hi everyone! This is Shoshana Walter (u/shoeshine1837) and Jill Castellano (u/marshall_project), and we’re investigative reporters for The Marshall Project. For the past couple years, Sho has been reporting on hospital drug testing of labor and delivery patients, and how many U.S. hospitals use tests that are quick and cheap, but easy to misinterpret with false positive rates as high as 50%. Women have ended up reported to child welfare authorities and forcibly separated from their children over positive tests caused by poppy seeds, and even meds hospitals gave them during childbirth. (here’s Sho’s previous AMA on that) We continued digging — discovering just how many of these reports child welfare authorities pass on to police or prosecutors. We collected never-before-published data from 21 states and found more than 70,000 cases were referred to law enforcement in a six-year period over alleged substance use during pregnancy — even though these reports are often based on flawed drug tests. In fact, in 15 states, more than half of these reports did not result in abuse or neglect findings by child welfare authorities, yet the reports were forwarded to law enforcement, anyway. In many cases, police investigations and arrests continued well after child welfare authorities declined to take further action. We found that thousands of parents have been referred to law enforcement for taking prescribed medications during pregnancy. Women have been interrogated or arrested over positive drug tests triggered by common foods and medications, such as Zoloft, the fentanyl in their epidurals, and legal CBD products. A few examples One of the women in our story, Ayanna Harris-Rashid in South Carolina, tested positive for marijuana after she ate CBD gummies during her pregnancy to ease pain and extreme nausea. Soon after giving birth to her third child, she was arrested, strip searched and jailed in a cold and crowded cell. She was charged with felony child neglect and faced up to 10 years in prison. (The charge was eventually dropped.) By the time she got out of jail, her milk supply had dropped and she found she could no longer breastfeed her newborn son. “It makes you almost lose faith in society like this is, this is what we've come to?” she told us in an interview. What happened to Ayanna is happening to women all across the U.S. We surveyed every state and found that 13 of them, including South Carolina, automatically refer every single allegation of pregnancy drug use to police or prosecutors. This is happening in blue states like Minnesota and red antiabortion states like Oklahoma, where 1 out of every 24 births is referred to law enforcement. (If you want to look up the policies and data in your state, please check out the interactive tool we created.) Are you pregnant, know someone who is, has been or will be? Do you have any questions or concerns about these policies? Ask us anything! We're Sho & Jill! submitted by /u/marshall_project [link] [comments]