Tamara Loertscher: Wisconsin Mother Is Thrown in Jail for Refusing Drug Treatment She Says She Didn’t Need.
This is what happens when you elect too many zealots to public office.
I can now say the same about another case out of Wisconsin: a woman arrested for drug use even though she says she stopped when she realized she was pregnant, brought to court and twice refused lawyers (even though her fetus was given one), and then sent to jail for 17 days, where she was placed in solitary confinement, denied prenatal care even as she began cramping, and not given her thyroid medication for two days, according to the woman and her lawyers.
In a conference call on Thursday, an attorney at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women outlined the case of 30-year-old Tamara Loertscher, who used meth and marijuana before she discovered she was pregnant. Brought in for two juvenile court hearings under the state’s so-called cocaine mom law, Loertscher refused to submit to in-patient treatment because, she said, she was not an addict and had stopped using drugs. She was then jailed for contempt of court. She was released from jail after agreeing to submit to regular tests, which—according to one of her lawyers, NAPW’s director of legal advocacy Sara Ainsworth—have repeatedly shown that she is clean. Nonetheless, the state of Wisconsin then informed her that it considered her a child abuser, which will prevent Loertscher from ever working again in her profession, as a certified nurse’s aide. Ainsworth says it could even prevent the soon-to-be mom from one day volunteering at her son’s school.