They were prosecuted for using drugs while pregnant. But it may not have been a crime.

Some local investigators and prosecutors are pursuing similar cases in Alabama, Oklahoma and South Carolina. They are policing pregnant people under an expanded interpretation of child abuse and neglect laws — even if parents birthed healthy babies, according to an investigation by The Marshall Project, Mississippi Today, AL.com, The Frontier and The Post & Courier.

Officials in Etowah County, Alabama, 185 miles to the east of Woods, are perhaps the champions of this approach, having arrested hundreds of women in the past several years.