15 years in prison for “endangering a fetus”? Then giving birth only for that child to not have a mommy during childhood, adolescence, and teenage years?
And this is considered good policy by those who create these laws?
wtf
The cruelty is the point. The well-being of the fetus is the excuse.
This is about forcing women to live in fear and under control of the patriarchy.
And punishing women for having sex.
With someone besides me. I mean, how could she? Send her to prison!
conservatives dont create logical policies. there is absolutely nothing logical about their ‘platform’… except maybe ‘brainwash masses to accumulate wealth’
The conservatives’ platform is entirely logical:
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Removing education, opportunities, and social safety nets keeps people ignorant, poor, and vulnerable.
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Without government willing to help, people in need are forced to turn to the church.
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Religion breeds more conservatives.
(Forced-birth polices not only take step #3 literally, but also enhance step #1 by burdening young people with kids they aren’t ready for.)
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Its not about creating healthy environments or being concerned about the sanctity of life.
its about punishing the “other” for reproducing and dictating everything a woman can do.
These are people who believe in generational punishment. You should be punished for what your parents did.
Remember, we’re all paying for what Adam and Eve did.
You’d think so, but try bringing up reparations and see how quickly they change their tune about the sins of their fathers.
Oh it’s always “different” when it’s me being judged…
I thought god forgave us for that when our ancestors nailed his son to a cross?
But only if you say you love Jesus forever and will follow the church.
It’s about control over women, none of the pedo conservatives care about the well being of kids at all.
I think it was for previous charges after she violated probation. But yeah, if we’re going to talk about endangering a fetus, then everyone who had a hand in her jail conditions and who ignored her when she went in to labor should also be in prison because every one of them is guilty of endangerment.
No she was one of several women imprisoned under a new Alabama statute for “chemical endangerment of a fetus.” You know, a “crime” that already can’t be committed again by the time the imprisoned reach trial for it because of the way our “justice” system works.
Those women aren’t allowed to endanger a fetus, but the all-knowing authorities are, apparently. (Yes, let’s forcibly cold-turkey detox a pregnant person who was using. Great idea.)
Oh I read the article last week and misremembered what the 15 years was for. Either way, not one person was actually interested in protecting her fetus.
All cops and judges have qualified immunity🤷
Not quite. Judges and prosecutors typically have absolute immunity: https://review.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/06/Keller-73-Stan.-L.-Rev.-1337.pdf
It’s never ever about protecting children.
And this is considered good policy by those who create these laws?
It’s only good for the private prison industry that funds their campaigns, and bad for pretty much everyone else.
Alabama is a conservative confederate state. This is their preferred political outcome, yes, exactly.
Did you read the article?
accusations that she’d tested positive for methamphetamine while pregnant
Pretty sure a child being raised in foster care is safer than one dying in the womb from narcotics poisoning.
Who conducted the tests? What is the false positive rate? Was retesting done to ensure accuracy? Does CPS get to choose the testing labs, maybe the ones that get the results that they want? Did the sample have identification on it that a manager at the testing center could trace to the person?
I will start believing the criminal justice system the day I don’t read weekly stories of missing body cam footage.
I don’t know but none of that is what we were discussing.
I see. Well clearly this police department deserves your blind faith.
What does any of this have to do with the police department? Do you have a response that is actually tangentially related to my comment?
Lmao pretend you can’t even fathom what he meant, that the system is rigged and that they got the result they wanted because the US is seemingly inherently corrupt.
Nonetheless it’s no surprise, this woman would’ve needed help and care. There’s only speculation that could be done regarding circumstances, but I think it boils down to the “pro life” - laws being ironic
I know exactly what they meant. What I don’t know is how it’s related to what I said.
We can have a conversation about how our prison systems treat prisoners. Which we’ll likely agree on
Or we can have a conversation about police abuse of power, which we’ll probably also agree on.
Or we can have a conversation about our broken criminal justice system, which seems boring because again, we’d probably just agree.
Or we can have a conversation about whether pregnant mothers, in general, should be allowed to be imprisoned for attempting to kill their unborn children, but it seems like people just want to derail the conversation with irrelevant arguments.
But you go on with ya bad self, Mr. Straw Man.
Jesus, what a nightmare story. That entire article is filled with horror. She must have felt so terrified and alone.
“After Caswell delivered her baby alone and lost consciousness, staff still refused to render aid and instead took photos of her baby without her consent, her lawyers allege. When she returned to the jail from the hospital, staff denied her access to her prescribed breast pump and ibuprofen.”
Wtf is wrong with people? It’s so fucking petty and mean. I’m gonna assume that none of the staff will actually face any consequences…?
Do they ever?
But over the next seven months of incarceration for “chemical endangerment” in the Etowah county detention center (ECDC), Caswell was denied regular access to prenatal visits, even as officials were aware her pregnancy was high-risk due to her hypertension and abnormal pap smears, according to a lawsuit filed on Friday against the county and the sheriff’s department. She was also denied her prescribed psychiatric medication and slept on a thin mat on the concrete floor of the detention center for her entire pregnancy.
It’s never been about protecting the fetus, it’s always been about punishing the woman for being a “slut”
Conservatism is a plague of oppression, misery and death. It always has been.
If a conservative can find a way to cause harm, they must do it. That is simply who they are at their core.
Don’t need to do any better when I can just keep everybody else down
They have no plan for building or creation. Nothing about taking care of citizens. It’s misery and lashing out at the other and these motherfuckers build a whole personality around simply objecting to progress. They are a cancer and we need to cut it out before the whole world is metastasized out of existence
what a “pro-life” move right? letting a mother and a newborn baby almost fucking die in prison
Yeah, at this point, they’re just being terrible humans.
But excellent capitalists!
U.S.A. The country where sociopathy is celebrated as a virtue by about half the population.
If you had any doubts, the half is of course mainly Republicans.
Probably much less than half, but general apathy and the two party system distorts how that looks.
Don’t forget gerrymandering.
And lack of term limits!
More than half.
Unbounded Greed is sociopathy (quite literally doing what’s best for oneself without any consideration for others) and even a Deadly Sin according to the Old Testament and the normalization of sociopathy is a countrywide phenomenon (worldwide even).
What we see here goes beyond the ‘mere’ “have no consideration for the suffering of others when acting in self interest” into an actual “make others suffer to serve some petty personal psychological need” - it goes beyond tyhe not caring about the suffering others when acting for personal upside maximization of sociopathy and into the actual vilany of harming others for personal enjoyment.
I like to believe that it’s not close, and that most of the republican voters have other strong opinions that align with the party. And thus the pro-quantity approach to birth rights is just something that follows the party even though they don’t agree with it.
I like to believe that.
In reality, I haven’t really spoken with or heard about any republicans who haven’t shaped their opinion in order to align with the party they are voting for.
I think women should maybe leave these places if they can. I wouldn’t even let a man think about having kids with me if I were a woman in any of those shit states.
…maybe leave these places if they can.
These laws are targeted towards poor women who can’t fight back. This one is making the news because she’s suing. I guarantee that if an attorney hasn’t taken up the fight, you’d never hear about it.
This seems like a good place for a charity… although the cost isn’t just a bus ticket but also probably temporary housing/income as well.
Shit. I just realized I’m suggesting a refugee agency for US states.
Yeah it’s increasingly needed, the problem is that they want all this national
Sounds like a good idea
Less a refugee agency and more of an underground railroad considering some of the laws that states are passing.
I completely agree with your statement. The issue with OPs statement is that it’s ideal for those with means but unrealistic for those without.
In some ways the opposite. When I left my shit tier flyover village I had nothing. Nothing was connecting me back home and there was no backup plan. It would be a lot more difficult for me to move now given all the roots I have put down.
What we think we control ends up controlling us. That mortgage that was supposed to make us free of landlords, that house we can’t sell, that car that we struggle to find parking for, that career we worked so hard on building. I am not advocating giving anything up I am pointing out you have absolute freedom when you have nothing to lose and can’t stay where you are.
You make a very good point.
If you are poor, wouldn’t it make more sense to be poor somewhere else? Starting over when you never had much would be my top priority rather than stay in these places.
those people are so incredibly brainwashed by conservatives, they will happily vote to their own detriment. but yay. fox news. free market. yay.
Minorities and vulnerable populations are in the best position to not be brainwashed. And if they leave those states hopefully they can go to a state that respects them as humans
Minorities in these places are typically facing poverty levels that most people in the US can’t imagine. How are they supposed to move when they can barely afford rent? As for the other women, the white women in these places genuinely don’t believe that these laws will affect them. There is this sense that they think that their adjacency to white men will prevent them from being treated the same as others, that somehow it will make them immune. They are getting a massive wakeup call that white men in power only care about other white men. It’s a tale as old as time. White women are and have always been our barrer to equality. Once things get bad enough for them they will jump on the side of minorities and equality again. They just don’t usually view themselves as one of us, they always think that this time will be different.
Yeah… I know. I just hope their lives can change for the better and they can exit these places. I just want people to have equal rights and be happy. It’s apparently asking a lot of religious old people, but fuck them
How? How are they supposed to leave? I lived in southern Louisiana and I was desperately poor then. Nobody I knew could afford to leave.
Whether we like it or not, it’s going to take widespread class solidarity and a generation of grassroots activism to undo this shit. The politically active will never give a shit about the politically inactive until they’re outnumbered. It sucks that people just trying to make ends meet have to start becoming grassroots activists on top of their already demanding jobs and lives, but rights were never freely given to the disenfranchised. They were taken.
reminds me of an old sam kinison bit regarding people who live in deserts and then suffer droughts. but agreed… those most in need of relocation are least capable.
The true detriment is a two party system. You are like a dog being thrown scraps by whichever party you vote for, and things are only getting worse while people continue to pick one side or the other and don’t overthrow the entire system they keep supporting.
No, the true detriment is civic illiteracy and widespread apathy. If people voted in droves and stayed engaged in the decisions that affect their lives, the institutional power of political parties would be nullified. The parties are powerful specifically because most people don’t give a shit. There’s a vacuum, and the party apparatus fills it.
Perhaps it’s different in other places, but in my experience people do give a lot of shits. The system is just built against us in such a way that it’s almost impossible to either have any hope of changing anything or see any changes that do happen. A huge cause of that disparity is the party system with it’s incessant bickering and corrupt propaganda.
Fifty-four percent of eligible voters sat out the 2022 midterms where Republicans took control of the House. Thirty-four percent sat out in 2020. Half of the country either doesn’t give a shit about the problems that could be fixed through active political engagement, or they don’t give a shit about active political engagement. Both forms of apathy lead to the same conclusion.
A significant portion of that apathy is driven by people who look at these numbers and somehow still come away with “it’s rigged@!!” as a conclusion. And that goes for both sides of the political spectrum. If the other 80 million people showed up to participate both during elections and afterwards while local, state, and federal decisions are being made (like, for example, at city council meetings), then the shockwaves that would send through the system would register on the Richter scale
People who think like you are part of the reason 80 million people sit on the sidelines and complain when shit doesn’t go their way. You know how Republicans completely changed the course of history in 2010? By showing up in numbers. You know how women changed the course of history in the early 20th century? By showing up in numbers. You know how black Americans changed the course of history in the 1960s? By showing up in numbers.
Nobody is going to do a damn thing for you if you sit on your ass and complain that change is impossible.
Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter are pretty recent examples of where “showing up in numbers” just wasn’t enough. The system is rigged and blaming victims isn’t getting us anywhere. Anecdotally throughout my life, I have seen uncountable numbers of people come to work/school/etc. with an “I voted” sticker, and my conspiracy theory is that the numbers are meaningless and the people who rigged the system already decide who is winning before the first vote is cast, unless they abandon the plan because their polling shows an absolute landslide that would reveal their fuckery.
Occupy Wall Street lasted 59 days, and BLM lasted 1 year in total, while most of the protests lasted little more than 5 months. Women’s suffrage groups started their organized resistance in the 1840s, roughly eighty years before they earned the right to vote, with significant violence erupting at their events in the 1850s and organizations forming at a rapid clip in the decades after the Civil War. Many women’s suffrage activists died of old age before they saw significant progress.
Civil Rights era activists campaigned in the streets for fourteen years. Hundreds were killed, thousands were injured, and tens of thousands were imprisoned. Cops sprayed peaceful protesters with fire hoses and had police dogs rip the flesh from their bodies. But still they showed up, they marched, and they fought as a group.
What you’re describing are part time slacktivists who showed up until it got uncomfortable and they got bored, at which time they let their apathy take back over and buried their noses in their cell phones. What you’re talking about is a bunch of virtue signaling, and it amounted to nothing precisely because there was no class solidarity or significant grassroots organization.
And fuck off with your “it’s rigged and votes are counted by the lizard people Illuminati” nonsense. You sound like a Proud Boy wannabe, and you’re eroding the faith people have in their own nation. Shame on you.
I’m not really interested in arguing this kind of stuff and I don’t disagree with you that a lack of voter engagement is a problem. But, I would encourage you to try and understand exactly why it seems like people don’t give a shit about the state of politics.
I’d be willing to bet that it’s not actually a lack of giving a shit, just a feeling that our time is better spent on other things in life. Those 80 million people “sitting on the sidelines” aren’t complaining for the fun of it, they are busy trying to live their lives and deal with their own problems. People feel like the system is rigged, not because of some ambiguous statistics, but because every time they try to work with the system they get shit on and forgotten. How can it not feel rigged when the majority of the country votes for one president and gets a different one instead? Or how about when states, without ever asking its citizens, take away a persons right to choose what happens to their own body? How is a system with an archaic electoral college, gerrymandering, corrupt politicians, and a parties that only represents the top 1% not a rigged system?
It’s not that we don’t know that showing up in numbers is a good way to enact change, nor are we just sitting on our collective asses complaining and expecting things will just magically change. We just aren’t holding out hope that enough numbers will show up to make a dent in our lifetimes, or that the changes will even be ones that benefit us.
The majority party in this country is the party that doesn’t vote.
The second major party is the party that complains endlessly about “both sides”.
The third major party is the party that votes one way because that’s what they’ve been told to do their whole life.
The fourth major party is the one that actually does research and engages that’s being driven mad by the other three.
All revolutions have hurt poor people the most.
Lol sure. So why try and improve things? You’ll only make it worse. Enjoy the scraps.
Please show me where I said to do nothing. Why don’t you try imagining new ways of improving things rather than repeating the mistakes of the past? Of the revolutions in the 18th-20th centuries, I think only the American revolution accomplished anything close to what it was intending. And that’s because it didn’t destroy all the existing institutions while in the process of implementing new ones.
(Not that I agree with what the American revolution was intending, but we did get mostly what they set out to do without thousands of poor civilians starving to death in the process.)
The american revolution upheld slavery in America so yeah you’re not wrong.
Our current institutions are the problem. Why should we keep them?
Our institutions are not the problem, our policies are the problem. I want to see a transition to UBI, but a dramatic overhaul that dismantled WIC and SNAP before we got UBI in place would be an unmitigated disaster for the very people we were intending to help.
It’s not the reform that I’m skeptical of. It’s the lust for revolutionary destruction as a path to reform that I’m skeptical of. It’s emotionally satisfying without regard to its actual efficacy in accomplishing the proposed reforms. Because history does not show us evidence that this works out well in the short nor the long run.
It also helped them the most.
By starving millions of them? Because that’s exactly what transpired during most of those revolutions. And the long term outcomes have not turned out to be better for poor people than the American revolution was. Show me the ideal communist state that resulted.
Revolutions often happen because of starvation. Not the other way around.
And I can tell you this… Billionaires and their conservative minions are making many of us extremely hungry.
Well they solved starvation by dramatically increasing it and then replaced old systems with new ones that have all those same old problems. So consider me unconvinced. I think we need to find a new way to change these systems that’s more resilient for the future
We could move if we wanted to. We aren’t, at least right now, because we’d leave behind our entire social network. Even if we moved where we know people, they wouldn’t help as much with our two young children. I know and understand and accept that. They don’t have to help with our kids, but we’d lose the people who can. We’d lose our kids friends and the network we are building in the neighborhood, which of course can be rebuilt, but that’s also a consideration. I’d probably only see my sister once a year if that because she can’t leave the state due to a custody agreement. Funds would also be an issue.
I also worry about too many democratic people leaving and making the state more red as a result and leaving behind those who can’t move, like my sister and her kids, who will suffer as a result of increasingly authoritarian laws. Some regressive politicians have outright said that it’s their goal to make it miserable for democratic and liberal people to force them to move, make the state redder, and thereby gain even more power.
Most Americans can’t afford a $500 emergency. Transplanting to a new state is off the table for a lot of people, especially women. If you have enough money to move, you probably also have enough money to take a weekend trip to get an abortion in a neighboring state.
Unless these things in the US seriously changes, I will never step foot there. I used to want to see all of the beautiful landscapes, animals, and buildings. I really did. Now, not so much.
If I have a medical emergency, I don’t want to be somewhere where they’ll delay necessary life saving treatment to first check if there might be a fetus.
Nope. Tbh, that also kind of sounds very similar to the things that they get angry at other countries for doing to women.
Another proud moment for Christianity
“Do unto others”, and all that.
If you are a woman, voting republican, you should be fucking ashamed of yourself. This is what this party thinks of you and your kind.
“your kind”
they just think she deserves it for using meth
Agreed, but then again, let’s say you don’t like democrats either, for whatever reason. What choices do you have? Any other party has zero chances. It’s time the US changes its voting laws to allow more than 2 parties to meaningfully exist, so people don’t have to always choose the lesser of the two evils.
Yeah okay, but if you’re a woman voting republican, you’re clearly choosing the more evil of two choices? I fully agree with the flawed two party system, but there’s an obvious better choice here. We’re talking about a singular issue: female reproductive rights.
Yep, you’re right, I’m just pointing out that for some, it’s not such clear cut. Ranked voting (or you know, a proportional system like in some European countries) would fix this.
I get it. But sometimes you’ve got to put out the fire before you start repainting the house.
Sorry but no.
So they’re losing maternity wards and jailing pregnant people. What a shithole.
Addicted to meth? That’s jail time. Wait, you’re a mother and you’re pregnant? That’s super jail time, 15 years for you. Have to fuck over your kids’ lives as much as possible. You also don’t get medical care and you have to give birth in a fungus-infested jail shower. Definitely ethical treatment under law here!
Caswell, who has faced several chemical endangerment charges over the years, is now in state prison, serving a 15-year sentence.
Not to take away from your comment but this woman clearly has major mental issues too. Why is she keep getting pregnant?
Lack of healthcare
Because “sterilization in lieu of prison” is too “eugenics” to be allowed as an option from the justice system.
She needed someone to explain to her that semi-permanent birth control measures demonstrate “rehabilitation” and “low risk of recidivism” after (or preferably, before) her first charge.
How anyone could vote for any republican is beyond reason. On top of being worthless traitor filth, they actively oppress women and endanger our future generations. Simply unfathomable.
Must own the libs!
A sizable number of them are simply glad about articles like this. It’s not about protecting children or anything. It’s about punishing women. I think a lot of GOP supporters don’t even explicitly think “I want to punish women”, but they implicitly enjoy when it happens. It’s more about imposing their religious beliefs than about anyone’s life or the likes.
And another sizable chunk are just apathetic. They’ll be willing to ignore stuff like this because it’s worth it in their mind to hurt LGBT people or whichever other GOP policy drives them. They’ll tell themselves this is just a tragic accident in their quest for the greater good, never viewing this as an entirely foreseeable consequence or even the outright goal.
Jesus masturbates to this
Current republicans, probably
It’s never been about the children. It has always been about controlling and dehumanizing women as this story so clearly demonstrates.
Yep, I thought everybody knew that already. They only care about the children as long as they’re inside the woman, the second she pushes that baby out they don’t have a care in the world anymore.
On the other hand, I DO believe some sort of intervention is needed when a drug addict gets pregnant, but I’m talking a locked rehab and not prison.
What about the risk for the mother? Holy shit, she didn’t even have access to a basic maternity ward. America is fucked.
The mother? Conservatives view women as objects to be controlled and used. To them, she got put in her place. They view it as a good thing.
based on what I’ve seen and heard from conservatives women only exist to please men and incubate children, after that they “lose their intrinsic value” and should either be put in prison for ‘being crazy’ or made to raise children/cook/clean at risk of being made homeless (or worse) if they don’t comply
