Stories like Banks’s and Burns’s – the needless and disproportionate incarceration, the loss of freedom and recourse inflicted on them on the basis of their pregnancies, the cruelty justified by authorities as “protection” for a fetus – are becoming more common. Alabama criminalizes more women for pregnancy than any other state. Just last year, Kim Blalock, a mother of six from Florence, Alabama, was charged with a felony for filling a longstanding prescription from her doctor while pregnant. Prosecutors charged that the medication, which Blalock was taking as prescribed, could have hurt her fetus, and that she should have known not to refill it. (Blalock later gave birth to a healthy baby boy.)
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