Act of Alabama No. 2006-204

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Act of Alabama No. 2006-204 is a law passed in 2006 that amends Title 26 of the Code of Alabama "Infants and Incompetents" to create a crime of "Chemical Endangerment of a Child."

The Senate Bill (SB 133) was filed by Senate President Pro Tem Lowell Barron and co-sponsored by 20 other Senators, from both parties. It defines various terms and establishes that, "knowingly, recklessly, or intentionally" causing a child to "be exposed to, to ingest, or inhale, or have contact with a controlled substance, chemical substance or drug paraphernalia," is guilty of a class C felony, and that if the child is thereby harmed, guilty of a class B felony, and if the child's death results, guilty of a class A felony. The law provides an affirmative defense for the proper administration of drugs lawfully prescribed for the child by a medical doctor. It was signed into law on March 10 by Governor Bob Riley.

Legal challenges

The law has been used to charge parents of children who were exposed to methamphetamines and heroin. It was later also used to prosecute women who used controlled substances during pregnancies. Because the crime fell under the category of child abuse, parents who were charged or convicted faced not only jail time, but also permanent loss of parental rights.

By 2014 more than 100 women had been arrested after testing positive for controlled substances during pregnancies. That application of the law was challenged, but the Alabama State Supreme Court decided in 2013, and confirmed in 2014, that fetuses and fertilized eggs are included by the term "child" under state law. In a separate concurring opinion in Ex Parte Hicks (2014) Chief Justice Roy Moore claimed that the 14th amendment's equal protection clause established an "inalienable right to life" for unborn children.

Amendments

In 2015, at the request of Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin, Representative Mack Butler sponsored a new bill which would require medical professionals to report pregnant women's positive tests for controlled substances to law enforcement within 2 hours. He explained to the House Health Committee that such women are sometimes hard to track down for prosecution because, "crackheads don't have permanent addresses." The bill did not advance.

By 2016 reporters found that the number of women charged with chemical endangerment of a fetus had grown to more than 479. They also found that Etowah County was especially aggressive in enforcing the law, while Marshall County, under then-district attorney Steve Marshall, was evidently trying to use it to push expectant mothers into treatment programs. In Calhoun County wildly different outcomes could result from similar cases.

An Alabama Health Care Improvement Task Force created by Governor Robert Bentley in 2015 recommended that the use of prescribed drugs be exempted from the Chemical Endangerment law, and that women discovered to have been using illegal drugs during pregnancy should receive court-ordered treatment rather than jail sentences.

Act of Alabama No. 2016-399, sponsored by Clyde Chambliss, Linda Coleman-Madison, Priscilla Dunn, and Vivian Figures, amended the law to affirm that if a pregnant woman had a "good faith belief" that her use of a controlled substance was "pursuant to a lawful prescription," that she would not be guilty of violating the law and that no one had a duty to report such use. The bill passed and was signed into law by Governor Bentley on May 12, 2016.

Abortifacients

In early 2023, following the U.S. Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade, the government issued new regulations intended to protect access to abortion services through the Veterans Administration and by making it easier to fulfill prescriptions for pharmaceutical abortifacients by mail. Under the Human Life Protection Act, signed by Governor Kay Ivey in 2019, pregnant women would not be criminally liable for receiving prohibited abortion care. However Steve Marshall, then Attorney General of Alabama, declared that his office would prosecute women who ended pregnancies with mifepristone and misoprostol under the Chemical Endangerment of a Child law.

References

External links

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