Justice for Regina McKnight

30 thoughts on Justice for Regina McKnight

1. Oh yay! How relieved she must be at this point. Heck, I’m relieved for her.

2. How wonderful for her! I hope this recognition that drug addiction does not give one an excuse to imprison pregnant (or no-longer pregnant) women continues and grows.

   I saw a young pregnant woman having a cigarette a few weeks ago and I (ironically) wanted to congratulate her. Of course, I do not think one should pick up the habit during pregnancy, but I defend her right to bodily autonomy EVEN IF it does damage to the fetus. It’s her body regardless of who’s in there.

3. One other thing to consider. I worked in a Jail where 99% of the female inmates were there due to drug use. Many of them actually had miscarriages while going through withdrawals. So one could argue, the incarceration and forced abstinence has caused the termination of a pregnancy.

4. I have a cousin who will never grow beyond the mental age of about 8, thanks to the things her mother drank, smoked, inhaled and used while pregnant, so I have a hard time completely exonerating women who abuse drugs and alcohol while they are pregnant. I’m all for physical autonomy and the right of women to make the choices concerning their bodies, obviously, but there does come a point when a bit of consideration has to be given to the fetus. Once the woman decides to keep the fetus, she is just as responsible for the fetus as she is for herself.

5. Once the woman decides to keep the fetus, she is just as responsible for the fetus as she is for herself.

   Even if that’s true, there is still no justification for jailing women who are drug addicts while pregnant. It isn’t a crime to be a drug addict, and that’s what these women are being prosecuted for — not possession, not sale, but their status as addicts. What they need is help — better pre-natal care, rehabilitative care, and resources to help them get off drugs and have healthy pregnancies. That isn’t going to happen if they’re afraid to be honest with their doctors (or even go to the doctor) because they might get thrown in jail.

6. Also, this:

   I saw a young pregnant woman having a cigarette a few weeks ago and I (ironically) wanted to congratulate her. Of course, I do not think one should pick up the habit during pregnancy, but I defend her right to bodily autonomy EVEN IF it does damage to the fetus. It’s her body regardless of who’s in there.

   Is, in my opinion, a little effed up. Yes, it is her body and she absolutely shouldn’t be punished or otherwise attacked for making choices that some people don’t approve of; she certainly shouldn’t be punished for having an addiction. But the idea that we’re going to applaud behavior that is unhealthy for both her and for the fetus, just because it’s proof that she can do what she wants? Eh, count me out of that movement.

7. Obviously such people shouldn’t be jailed, but they shouldn’t have children, either. Sterilization + basic income guarantee would be quite a fair and humane solution. ‘We’ll take care of you if you promise not to breed.’ Fuck all you want, and get money instead of a (usually unwanted, and always irresponsible) pregnancy. I bet many of the world’s poor (or even not so poor) would kill for such a sweet deal. Hell, I’d be the first to sign up…

   And yes, this is a serious, practical proposal. Pregnancy is neither a ‘blessing’ nor a ‘right’; it’s a sexually transmitted disease. It is a curse, and the primary source of female disempowerment.

   Even the fucking bible agrees…

   Unto the woman He said: “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”

   Don’t be evolution’s little bitch; childfreeness (or at least artificial wombs) ftw!

8. What they need is help — better pre-natal care, rehabilitative care, and resources to help them get off drugs and have healthy pregnancies. That isn’t going to happen if they’re afraid to be honest with their doctors (or even go to the doctor) because they might get thrown in jail.

   I second that.

   Also, it was found in one study that 2/3 of drug treatment centers do not treat pregnant women. And black and Latina women make up the overwhelming majority of those being jailed, while they are no more likely than white women to abuse drugs while pregnant.

9. Obviously such people shouldn’t be jailed, but they shouldn’t have children, either. Sterilization + basic income guarantee would be quite a fair and humane solution. ‘We’ll take care of you if you promise not to breed.’

   That is fucking disgusting. “Such people” are not animals; they don’t need a “humane” solution. They deserve human rights, and the right to bodily integrity is one of them.

10. Pregnancy is neither a ‘blessing’ nor a ‘right’; it’s a sexually transmitted disease

    Well, I’ll disagree on that, but it is certainly a right to avoid government interference into your reproductive life. You really think that the government should be able to come in and sterilize (or coerce into sterilization) women who are poor, or who are drug users, or who are otherwise “unfit” to parent? Sounds a lot like eugenics to me. And if you think pregnancy is a sexually transmitted disease, fine — I support 100% your right to avoid pregnancy however you see fit. But you don’t get to tell other women that our wanted pregnancies are “diseases.” The female body is maligned enough; we don’t need our natural reproductive functions demonized as well. And we certainly don’t need more people trying to control women’s bodies by telling them when they can and cannot reproduce. Lots of women have dealt with that quite enough.

    And congratulations, it’s not even noon and you’ve already made me feel incredibly ill.

11. Wow, a lot of weirdness in here today. I’m glad you covered this. All of the evidence supports better outcomes for mother and child when medical care is made readily available for addicts. Unfortunately the desire to punish poor women has often overwhelmed real genuine concern for mothers and children. Though reading the story it sounds like she may have another trial? And that the question is over the science (is cocaine harmful) rather than a move away from these kinds of prosecutions because they are senseless.

12. Though reading the story it sounds like she may have another trial?

    That’s up in the air. I think the RH Reality Check story made it sound more likely than it actually is. I’d imagine the state of SC is sick of dealing with this, since there’s been so much litigation over it. The prosecutor was quoted in another article making comments that sounded like s/he isn’t going to re-try McKnight. Let’s hope that’s true.

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14. I want to add to this that in college we read a few pieces about ramifications of the father’s behavior on a fetus. It was very interesting although underresearched and underrepresented in conversations like this. The articles were noting that abuse of cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol by the father in the months prior to and around the time of conception do affect the fetus as much as a woman’s behavoir prior to and around the time of conception. Of course a woman also carries a fetus for nine months and has a much greater impact on the health of the fetus over those nine months than the father does in some cases (not in all cases since physical/sexual abuse of pregnant women is far from unheard of). Anyway it is just food for thought. These same articles also noted that poor nutrition, often beyond the control of those living in poverty, is the number one most significant factor in term of fetal health.

15. Obviously such people shouldn’t be jailed, but they shouldn’t have children, either. Sterilization + basic income guarantee would be quite a fair and humane solution.

    Forced sterilization? Are you insane? Can you not see the negative potential here?

    That being said, what can be done to protect the life of the child who will be born? I know of a case where the young woman is an addict, and any child she births will immediately be seized by the government. She continues to give birth to baby after baby (I think she’s up to 9 now). All these babies have FAS and other problems as a result of her actions. That’s 9 lives she’s irreparably damaged.

    FWIW, I live in Canada, where she collects welfare and has access to free medical care. She could choose to be sterilized, but hasn’t. She has been through rehab a number of times.

    So, we just continue to allow her (and others like her) to create pain and suffering in children’s lives (and unlike others, I won’t bitch about the amount of money she costs the medical system. That’s the point of it. To help people). Is that fair? To have kid after kid be born with preventable illnesses and handicaps?

16. luna,
    i struggle with the same types of questions. if we say these women need help, what does that mean exactly? Rehab? Are they locked in at night? Where is the tipping point where concern for the fetus competes with the womans right to do as she pleases with her body. Jail seems to be, as it usually is, the wrong answer but whats the right one? Can the state sue a woman for the cost of care if it can be proven chemicals she willfully ingested during pregnancy caused deformities in the child? Do we not already do that to corporations who willfully pollute and cause birth defects? Not that a woman is like a company but I just dont see an easy answer to this.

17. I don’t know… if this is cause for celebration. I absolutely agree that you can’t hold a woman guilty of murder if her baby is stillborn because of things she did while pregnant; it’s very good that this kind of legal precedent has been nipped in the bud. That said, what happened with this woman and her baby was a tragedy, and it was a tragedy largely of her own making. She should get our support for her legal cause, but doesn’t she sort of, uh, deserve our opprobrium? Isn’t it kind of infantilizing and dehumanizing not to consider the choices involved in what happened with the stillborn baby? Sort of in line with what Jill said about the woman you see smoking while pregnant; she should absolutely have the choice to do that, but, uh, you might want to shoot her a little “what you are doing is totally screwed up” look.

18. I absolutely agree that you can’t hold a woman guilty of murder if her baby is stillborn because of things she did while pregnant; it’s very good that this kind of legal precedent has been nipped in the bud. That said, what happened with this woman and her baby was a tragedy, and it was a tragedy largely of her own making.

    Actually, there’s not a lot of evidence that cocaine can cause a miscarriage or stillbirth. From Jill’s link above, with my emphasis:

    Susan Dunn, one of the attorneys representing McKnight, said that the South Carolina Supreme Court’s opinion “acknowledges that current research simply does not support the assumption that prenatal exposure to cocaine results in harm to the fetus, and the opinion makes clear that it is certainly no more harmful to a fetus than nicotine use, poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care, or other conditions commonly associated with the urban poor.”

    There are multiple reasons why she may have had a stillborn baby, and the cocaine itself is not even the most likely of those reasons. It’s just the one that prosecutors felt they could get her jail time for, since even the most conservative court wouldn’t be willing to throw a woman in jail for poor nutrition or lack of prenatal care.

19. That is a really good point, Mnemosyne. Thanks for making it civilly.

20. Cocaine readily crosses the placental and fetal brain barriers and has a direct effect on the developing fetal brain according to this and this.

    I agree with many above that jailing addicted pregnant women isn’t the answer, and would have a domino effect. At the same time, cheering for this woman seems wrong too. She is more deserving of help than criminal conviction, but cocaine addiction, despite lack of medical resources in poor communties, is still more controlable than poor nutrition.

    As Luna says, protecting the life of the unborn child is important. The children studied in the links above count too. Their lives were impacted adversely by this. I don’t have any great suggestions, except educational outreach into poor communities (would need to think more about implementation), but the “great verdict!” conclusion here strikes me as a bit… lacking.

21. octagalore, the prosecution successfully argued that McKnight murdered her child by using cocaine while she was pregnant, not that she caused developmental damage. Even the article you pointed to says,

    States have continued the varying legal activities on policy decisions that affect women who use illegal drugs during pregnancy. Recent studies, however, have failed to support any association between prenatal cocaine exposure (PCE) and increased prevalence of newborn serious congenital malformations or medical complications.

    I’m not arguing that it’s perfectly okay to use cocaine while pregnant — clearly, the evidence is that it’s harmful to the child’s future development. However, there is NO evidence that using cocaine while pregnant causes fetal death, and that’s what McKnight was facing 12 years in prison for.

    I agree that we need to do better for pregnant addicts and their children. But prosecuting them for murder under false pretenses is not the way to do it.

22. Mnemosyne — sorry but that’s unresponsive. I did argue against criminal prosecution in that very post. And I was talking about the situation of the pregnant addict, not Regina’s situation in particular, in terms of prevention.

    My voicing the sentiment that I have a little trouble cheering enthusiastically about the verdict doesn’t mean I disagree with it. It just means that, as a mom (not that being one is necessary for this argument), it’s hard to get excited when the underlying context is that a child gets hurt — whether sooner or later. The tone here is a little more celebratory than I’m comfortable with, personally.

23. Jill wrote:

    That is fucking disgusting. “Such people” are not animals; they don’t need a “humane” solution.

    No, they aren’t animals, but they are highly irresponsible, mentally impaired (and often mentally ill) persons who are a danger to themselves and others. The sterilization (which could in fact be voluntary in many cases) + basic income combo may not solve all their problems, but at least it would help to contain the problem and tide them over until we have more effective means to deal with (drug) addiction and whatever other mental problems they may have. Makes sense, no?

    They deserve human rights, and the right to bodily integrity is one of them.

    Even if this ‘right’ increases their own suffering, spreads it to their children, and places a heavy burden on society? Sounds like blind dogmatism to me. In fact, it reminds me of the pro-lifers with their ‘let’s save babies and damn the consequences’ attitude.

    You really think that the government should be able to come in and sterilize (or coerce into sterilization) women who are poor, or who are drug users, or who are otherwise “unfit” to parent?

    In extreme cases, yes. It’s a logical extension of involuntary commitment, and really not fundamentally different.

    Sounds a lot like eugenics to me.

    The basic idea behind eugenics, better genes (and, by extension, people) through careful selective breeding and/or direct genetic manipulation, is actually not only rational, but also something of a moral imperative. Don’t we, as civilized, thinking beings, have a certain obligation towards our (potential) offspring to make them as healthy, strong, beautiful, and intelligent as possible? Isn’t it in fact barbaric to breed randomly, mindlessly, like animals?

    And if you think pregnancy is a sexually transmitted disease, fine — I support 100% your right to avoid pregnancy however you see fit. But you don’t get to tell other women that our wanted pregnancies are “diseases.” The female body is maligned enough; we don’t need our natural reproductive functions demonized as well.

    The whole point is that women aren’t their reproductive functions. They are individuals, ends in themselves rather than means to an end. An attack on procreation is NOT an attack on women in general. Indeed, if anything it’s an attack on the patriarchy, which tends to prefer its women meek, barefoot & pregnant.

    And we certainly don’t need more people trying to control women’s bodies by telling them when they can and cannot reproduce. Lots of women have dealt with that quite enough.

    This isn’t about control; it’s about self-liberation. For countless centuries women have been brainwashed and guilt tripped into believing that their primary ‘purpose’ is to bear and rear children; that it’s their (sacred) duty to risk life & limb, and sacrifice their freedom, for their family/tribe/country/whatever; that infertility is some kind of curse rather than a blessing in disguise. Well fuck all that. Fuck evolution, which placed the burden of procreation disproportionately on women, and fuck the social structures that ruthlessly took advantage of this innate weakness, and made a bad situation infinitely worse. Give them the finger and be (child)free. If they want offspring so badly, let them build artificial wombs. Surely we could have them within a decade if it becomes the new Manhattan project or Apollo program; it’s just an extension of existing technologies, after all.

    It’s time to stop fooling ourselves with romantic fantasies, and see pregnancy for what it really is: a cumbersome, disempowering, and potentially dangerous relic from a primitive, animalistic past. Time to get civilized.

    And congratulations, it’s not even noon and you’ve already made me feel incredibly ill.

    Are you sure it wasn’t something else?

24. It just means that, as a mom (not that being one is necessary for this argument), it’s hard to get excited when the underlying context is that a child gets hurt — whether sooner or later.

    How is the “underlying context” that a child gets hurt when the stillbirth was almost certainly not caused by cocaine?

    For me, the underlying sadness of this case is that no one cared that she was using drugs while pregnant until she had a stillborn baby. No one intervened. No rehab program would take her because she was pregnant. Even if she had wanted to get off drugs, she had no options to safely do so.

    The government only cared about her fetus, and even that didn’t happen until it was born dead.

25. The underlying context is that whatever the result in the instant case, “prenatal cocaine exposure is associated with specific cognitive impairments and a lower likelihood of an above average IQ…”Cocaine readily crosses the placental and fetal brain barriers and has a direct effect on the developing fetal brain” according to the earlier link.

    Cognitive impairments caused when cocaine crosses fetal brain barriers and affects the developing brain = a child getting hurt.

26. “For me, the underlying sadness of this case is that no one cared that she was using drugs while pregnant until she had a stillborn baby. No one intervened. No rehab program would take her because she was pregnant. Even if she had wanted to get off drugs, she had no options to safely do so.”

    It’s a tragedy that she didn’t have access to rehab, through no fault of her own.

    The idea of nobody caring she was using drugs is part of the overall problem of poverty. It’s not that nobody cared, but like homeless people (which McKnight was) and the poor generally, they are left behind in all ways.

    I see the solution as either a general economic fix that would remedy the income gap (not holding our collective breaths, I’m sure) or a targeted program that would fund pro bono rehab centers which would welcome pregnant women as well as poor people generally.

27. Woohoooooooo!

28. Cognitive impairments caused when cocaine crosses fetal brain barriers and affects the developing brain = a child getting hurt.

    My sister-in-law decided to have a second child with her boyfriend even though (a) he’s a drug addict with untreated severe ADHD and bipolar and (b) her older child with him has severe (treated) ADHD and bipolar symptoms, both of which he takes medication for.

    By choosing to have a child with someone that she knows has these genetic deficits, she is hurting that child, especially since she knows that her son’s half-brother has the same problems and that her boyfriend’s brothers all have the same problems.

    Therefore, she should have been prevented from having the second child, yes? After all, she is deliberately hurting her child because she knows her child will have ADHD and probably be bipolar as well, just like the child’s two brothers, father, and uncles.

    Not to mention that the long-term effects of cocaine on a developing fetus are a bit more equivocal than in your previous links. Even the National Institute on Drug Abuse says:

    Despite the documented deficits of some of the children in our longitudinal studies, most have passed one developmental milestone after another, albeit some more slowly than their unexposed peers. Researchers have had the gratifying experience of watching many of these children grow, walk, talk, interact with their families and social environments, and progress from grade to grade in school.

    A child that was exposed to cocaine in the womb will have similar deficits as my sister-in-law’s children, and may well have lesser problems than they have. Does that make her a child abuser?

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30. I’m just wondering when they will charge drug addicted men with homicide/abuse if children they father are stillborn or otherwise affected. I don’t see a difference here.

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