Alabama’s Meth Lab Law, Abortion Rights, and the Strange Case of Jane Doe - Pacific Standard
The case of the woman, identified only as Jane Doe, is extraordinary in many ways, including how abruptly it seems to have ended—or maybe hasn’t. Earlier this month, after the woman told jail officials she was in her first trimester and wanted an abortion, the Lauderdale district attorney took the unprecedented step of petitioning a juvenile court to strip her of parental rights to her unborn child. Doe’s fetus was given a court-appointed lawyer. The proceedings, like most everything that happens in juvenile court, were secret.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit on the woman’s behalf, demanding that she be granted a medical furlough or supervised travel to a Huntsville abortion clinic for appointments she made before her arrest. “I am very distraught,” woman said in a declaration in the ACLU case. “[I] do not want to be forced to carry this pregnancy to term.”
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Michele Bratcher Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine who writes often about reproductive issues, reached back to the 19th century for an analogy. Forcing a woman to forgo an abortion that she wants and to bear a child that she has no desire to parent “conscripts [her] into a chattel-like status,” Goodwin said. “The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. You can’t have enslaved bodies no matter what the state’s intention may be.”
More: Alabama’s Meth Lab Law, Abortion Rights, and the Strange Case of Jane Doe - Pacific Standard
Alabama’s CHEMICAL ENDANGERMENT OF EXPOSING A CHILD TO AN ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES ARE PRODUCED OR DISTRIBUTED is being used in a new way to prosecute this case.
from FindLaw