As a former lay midwife, I’m very sensitive to these issues. There were court cases where women were threatened with being put in jail for planning to have home deliveries, because some doctors considered it “child abuse” — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a damned slippery slope, and the legal system would do well to stop decisions like this:
JACKSON, Wis. — Alicia Beltran cried with fear and disbelief when county sheriffs surrounded her home on July 18 and took her in handcuffs to a holding cell.
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.
“I didn’t know unborn children had lawyers,” recalled Ms. Beltran, now six months pregnant, after returning to her home north of Milwaukee from a court-ordered 78-day stay at a drug treatment center. “I said, ‘Where’s my lawyer?’ ”
Under a Wisconsin law known as the “cocaine mom” act when it was adopted in 1998, child-welfare authorities can forcibly confine a pregnant woman who uses illegal drugs or alcohol “to a severe degree,” and who refuses to accept treatment.
Now, with Ms. Beltran’s detention as Exhibit A, that law is being challenged as unconstitutional in a federal suit filed this month, the first in federal court to challenge this kind of fetal protection law. Its opponents are hoping to set an important precedent in the continuing tug of war over the rights of pregnant women and legal status of the unborn.
And here’s the fucking irony of this whole thing, because these are the known risks of the drug they want to force on this pregnant woman:
Neonatal withdrawal has been reported in the infants of women treated with buprenorphine during pregnancy. From post-marketing reports, the time to onset of neonatal withdrawal signs ranged from Day 1 to Day 8 of life with most cases occurring on Day 1. Adverse events associated with the neonatal withdrawal syndrome included hypertonia, neonatal tremor, neonatal agitation, and myoclonus, and there have been reports of convulsions, apnea, respiratory depression, and bradycardia.
There you go.
It’s funny how the Libertarian, T-bag, Republican Right wants smaller government………except when they don’t. These fascists keep blabbering on about how the Left is destroying this countries individual freedoms while they call on government to enforce laws that violate a woman’s individual reproductive rights at every turn. What these freaks want is what ‘they’ want and the rest of us be damned.
“Which ‘anti-addiction drug’ and what are its fetal effects?” That was my first thought from a medical perspective.
Nobody needs a science background to figure that out. Just a bit of logic. So even if your ethics towards women is non-existent, which is the main point, it’s inexcusably stupid.
Horror doesn’t begin to describe being forced to take a drug against your will. And yeah, these small-government, don’t-tread-on-me freaks think nothing of forcing a drug down a woman’s throat or pushing an ultrasound device up her vagina against her will.
Somewhat related (or not ) I recently read they are beginning to suspect drugs to induce labor increase chances of autism in the child.
The medical establishment has forgotten to first do no harm. They’ve also forgotten money is the root of all evil.