Introduction

Summary

In the spring of 2013, in a hearing room in Tennessee, a group of legislators came together to create a new crime – the crime of fetal assault. A woman would be guilty of this crime if she took illegal narcotics while pregnant and her child was harmed as a result. The maximum punishment for this crime was eleven months and twenty-nine days in jail. Ultimately over the course of two years, about 120 mostly low-income women – rural, urban, Black, and white – would be prosecuted in Tennessee for fetal assault. The law was justified, in large part, by a very strange and deeply disturbing set of ideas: that the only way to help women who used illegal drugs while pregnant was to prosecute them, and that the prosecution itself was not only a road to treatment but was actually a form of treatment in and of itself. Despite these perhaps benevolent seeming ideas, the reality was quite different. Overwhelmingly, those women pled guilty and faced sentencing.