Katie McDonough, writing in Salon, brings us the instructive tale of Tamara Loertscher, a woman who admitted to her doctor when she went in for a pregnancy test that she had been using marijuana and meth, but that she had stopped the drugs as soon as she thought she might be pregnant:
It didn’t matter. Loertscher lives in Wisconsin, and a law there allows the state to arrest, detain and incarcerate pregnant women found to be using drugs, or, in Loertscher’s case, pregnant women who have used drugs in the past.
Hospital workers reported her, and a process was set in motion. The state accused her of child abuse and appointed her fetus a lawyer. (This is a familiar pattern.) She was ordered into an in-patient treatment facility, despite the fact that she was no longer using drugs and had voluntarily sought medical care. She refused, and was soon incarcerated.
