This article by Adam Nossiter in the New York Times is informative as it throws many competing values headlong into each other, allowing one to actually think:
- Use of drugs by an individual
- Use of drugs by an individual who is pregnant
- Probable State zealotry in prosecuting
One thing which denies sympathy in spades to the women highlighted in the article (women who are truly doing harm to another human being, not just themselves) is their own backgrounds:
A day after she gave birth in 2006, Tiffany Hitson, 20, sat on her front porch crying, barefoot and handcuffed. A police officer hovered in the distance.
Ms. Hitson’s newborn daughter had traces of cocaine and marijuana in its system, and the young woman, baby-faced herself, had fallen afoul of a tough new state law intended to protect children from drugs, and a local prosecutor bent on pursuing it.
....
"I made the biggest mistake of my life & did some drugs with her father right before I went into labor, unaware I was about to have her," Ms. Hitson wrote to the court from the Covington County Jail, in neat schoolgirl script, pleading to be released after her arrest in October 2006. "Please, please let me spend this most important time with my baby," she wrote.
But the judge had set bond at $200,000 — Ms. Hitson had earlier been charged in connection with a break-in, and with credit-card fraud — and in jail she stayed.
....
The environment can be unforgiving. Rachel Barfoot, 31, who had been charged before with beating her niece, told her probation officer that she was pregnant. When she tested positive for cocaine, she was arrested.
"I was in shock," said Ms. Barfoot. "I told the truth, but the truth got me nowhere," she said in an interview. Three months pregnant, already a mother of four, she spent five weeks in the Covington County Jail.
....
It is not as though we are dealing with Joan's of Arc here.
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