Alabama locks up pregnant marijuana users — and won’t let them post bail

A pregnant woman in Alabama has been held in jail for three months after officers learned she had smoked weed — and she’s not the only one.

On May 25, 23-year-old Ashley Banks was pulled into a routine traffic stop when officers noticed a small amount of marijuana in her car. When she admitted to smoking weed two days earlier, the same day she found out she was pregnant, they threw her in jail without a trial.

According to The Guardian, Alabama has a law that allows for this strange occurrence. Unlike most drug crimes, where people have the option to post bail and walk away, pregnant women are instead placed in government custody to protect the fetus.

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The case of Banks is particularly egregious; Initially, officials wanted her interned in a drug rehabilitation program. Upon examining her, the center staff turned her away, believing that she was an occasional marijuana user and therefore unlikely to reap the benefits of her service. This resulted in her three-month prison sentence.

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Banks’ pregnancy worsened while in custody. With a family history of miscarriages and difficult pregnancies, Banks often bled in prison and lacked medical care. She was forced to sleep in a cell that often had too many women, leading to her sleeping on the floor at one point. She’s not the only one. According to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), Alabama’s Etowah County has incarcerated 150 pregnant women in recent years, 12 of whom are still in prison.

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The Guardian argues that these decisions reinforce how the pro-life movement sees women as less valuable than the fetuses they carry. The movement claims to see embryos and fetuses as persons, and in practice they speak as if these ‘persons’ were not equal women but their superiors: the fetus is seen as more important than the woman, as more worthy, less so tainted by those things that make a pregnant woman so unattractive,” reads the article.

While Alabama is particularly harsh on incarceration rates and treatment of pregnant women, this problem will only continue to increase if Roe v. Wade is lifted. And while it can be harmful for pregnant women to use marijuana, there is a big difference between using weed and using other drugs, something that federal law fails to recognize.