That’s what Bethany Cajúne told me the first time we spoke about her experience in Montana’s Lake County Detention Facility. “No one should go through what I went through.” We filed a case earlier today to make sure that Bethany’s desire to protect other women becomes a reality.

This past March, Bethany voluntarily reported to the detention facility to complete an outstanding short-term sentence for traffic violations. At that time, she was approximately four to five months pregnant, raising five small children, and attending GED classes four days a week. She was also about to successfully complete her first year in a medication-treatment program for a diagnosed addiction to opioid drugs. What Bethany didn’t know when she reported to the facility was that detention officials would withhold her medication, which was prescribed to suppress withdrawal symptoms and facilitate Bethany’s recovery, and was now critical for protecting the health of her pregnancy.

Despite several attempts by Bethany’s treating physician and drug treatment counselor to ensure that Bethany continue receiving her medication, facility officials, including its chief medical doctor, denied her this care. As a result, Bethany suffered complete and abrupt withdrawal, experienced constant vomiting, diarrhea, rapid weight loss, dehydration, and other withdrawal symptoms, all extremely dangerous during pregnancy. Despite repeated warnings of the serious risk abrupt withdrawal posed to Bethany’s health and pregnancy, including miscarriage, the facility continued to withhold her medication. Instead of receiving appropriate medical care, she was at various times confined in an unsanitary and windowless solitary confinement cell, told to “tough it out,” and shackled during an ultrasound examination. It took the intervention of a public defender to secure her release so that she could resume the treatment. In the end, Lake County knowingly put Bethany’s health and pregnancy at severe risk for nine days.

Luckily, Bethany’s story has a happy ending. After she resumed treatment, Bethany regained her health and gave birth to a healthy baby girl. She has also since completed her GED and is looking forward to the next chapter in her life. Part of moving on for Bethany is ensuring that no one else will go through what she went through.

Learn more about Bethany’s experience and the case the ACLU filed today on her behalf by watching this video:

Well, many of us thought this day would never come: the House of Representatives is finally prepared to vote on the Affordable Health Care for America Act. It's hard to understate the historic nature of this particular vote. President Roosevelt — the first one, in 1912 — campaigned on a promise of health care reform, and nearly 100 years later, a comprehensive health reform bill has yet to make it to the floor for a vote.

If it comes to the floor for a vote — anti-choice lawmakers, led by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), are threatening to use procedural maneuvers to derail health care reform over abortion.

Pro-choice advocates had hoped beyond hope that abortion would be treated like any other health care service during health reform. Throughout their lives, women access a broad continuum of reproductive health care services, including contraceptive services, prenatal care, and abortion, and we asked for a principled approach to health care reform that would reflect that reality. But politics and ideology have made that impossible. Instead, lawmakers have crafted a compromise position, often referred to as the Capps Amendment, that would maintain the status quo and advance neither a pro- nor anti-choice agenda — and therefore convince enough anti-choice Democrats to vote for the bill to ensure its passage.

So, the wonky details: the Capps Amendment would prohibit abortion from being included in the basic, standard health benefit package that insurance companies would have to make available under health care reform, but would require that at least one plan in the Exchange cover abortion and that at least one not cover abortion. It would also mandate that plans that do cover abortion segregate their funds and ensure that only private premiums (and not federal dollars) are used to cover abortion. The public plan would cover abortion in the case of rape, or incest, or when a woman's life is threatened by a pregnancy (the status quo for public funding for abortion care), and the Secretary of Health and Human Services would be allowed to determine whether the public plan could cover abortion in additional circumstances. The pro-choice community has accepted this compromise even though it is hard to swallow; it is less than what women need and deserve.

But, the compromise is not enough for some anti-choice Democrats and Republicans. They want to use health care reform to impose unprecedented restrictions on women's access to abortion in the health care system. They wish to ban any plan that receives any federal dollars from covering abortion even though abortion funding would already come only from private funds under the current compromise. By attempting to ban plans from covering abortion, they intend to curtail access to abortion services even when a woman pays for her insurance with private funds and receives no federal subsidy. In other words, they want to take away women's access to health benefits they currently rely on.

Because the House leadership may not allow an amendment to further limit abortion access, anti-choice members have threatened to vote against the Rule that would bring health care reform to the House floor. The Rule is the language setting the grounds for debate on a bill; unless the Rule passes, the bill cannot be considered. Or if that doesn't work, they may offer a "motion to recommit" on abortion that, if passed, would prohibit insurance companies in the Exchange from providing abortion coverage even if they want to. They are contemplating hijacking a whole bill with so much at stake for so many people over a health care service that should be a private decision between a woman and her doctor. <really big sigh>

House Leadership has scheduled the health care reform vote for 6 p.m. on Saturday, November 7, but the debate might run into Sunday. So, we have until then to tell the House to support the Rule and oppose any and all attacks on reproductive rights in the health care reform bill. Please go to our Action Center, and call your Representative now.

(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

This has been a year of progress on one of the least justified policies that many prison administrators still follow. On October 2, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, by a vote of 6-5, held that a jury should decide whether there was a need to shackle Shawanna Nelson while she was in late-stage labor, because such treatment, in the absence of a security need, constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment" in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This is a critical legal victory in the campaign of the ACLU and many allies to end the practice of shackling pregnant prisoners who are in labor.

Shawanna Nelson entered an Arkansas prison in June 2003 with a short sentence for a nonviolent crime. When she went into labor, the correctional officer accompanying her shackled her legs to both sides of her hospital bed. She remained shackled until she was taken to the delivery room. After the birth of her son, the shackles were again placed on her legs. She suffered intense pain and lasting medical problems from the birth and the inability to move her legs. After childbirth, authorities’ refusal to remove the shackles forced her to soil the bed. The correctional officer knew that she was not a flight risk, and knew that the restraints caused pain and unsanitary conditions.

After a federal district judge allowed her case to go forward, Arkansas appealed to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, which threw out the case. At that point, the ACLU became involved, and staff from the Reproductive Freedom Project, National Prison Project and the ACLU of Arkansas assisted Shawanna’s lawyer in filing a petition asking that the case be reheard by the full 8th Circuit Court. The argument before the full court was hard fought and the court appeared to be closely divided. After I finished arguing on Shawanna’s behalf, I was uncertain whether she had won or lost that day. But I was thrilled and heartened by her presence, since she had been released from prison and was building a new life for herself and her son. Cathi Compton, her other attorney, introduced her to the court, so that they could see the real person who had been subjected to this inhumane practice.

Shackling women in labor and during childbirth is extraordinarily dangerous, for both mother and newborn, yet most jails and prisons mindlessly continue the practice, despite a dearth of evidence that any woman has escaped from custody during child birth. Shackling women during labor and delivery is almost never needed from a security perspective. Rather, shackling imposes a physically and emotionally devastating additional punishment on those women who give birth during incarceration, and a punishment completely unrelated to the blameworthiness of the woman subjected to this degradation.

Luckily, the ACLU and other advocates are gaining precious ground in the struggle to end this practice. Most recently, New York joined the list of states that have by statute prohibited this shackling during labor and delivery except in extremely limited circumstances. The federal Bureau of Prisons has also voluntarily reformed its practices; Immigration and Customs Enforcement, however, needs to follow suit so that women giving birth as immigration detainees do not suffer like Shawanna. Let us hope that, very soon, shackles in labor will have gone the way of the practice of chaining prisoners to a hitching post as punishment, and no more women will be victims of this painful and unnecessary practice.

Yesterday the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals heard oral argument in a case challenging the discriminatory punishment and incarceration of a pregnant woman, Amber Lovill, who violated the terms of her probation when she tested positive for drugs.  Attorneys for both sides agreed that they would not have found themselves before Texas' highest court for criminal appeals had a probation officer not commented on Ms. Lovill's pregnancy in explaining why the State jailed her in 2007.  But the fact is, the probation officer did identify Ms. Lovill's pregnancy as the reason she was treated more harshly than other probationers who relapse in their struggle to overcome substance abuse.  Although probation officers said they typically work with probationers who relapse through less restrictive approaches such as increased visits and drug testing, they were unwilling to work with Ms. Lovill because she was pregnant.  In the State’s own words, because she was pregnant she could not “maintain the willpower necessary to overcome a drug addiction.”   So they locked her up in Nueces County Jail for the remainder of her pregnancy.

At argument, Ms. Lovill's attorney emphasized to the Court of Criminal Appeals that when the State takes action for discriminatory purposes, such as a probationer's status or capacity as a pregnant woman, it violates the Constitution and Texas' Equal Rights Amendment.  Certainly, women who violate the law should not receive a free pass because they are pregnant.  But, as addressed in the ACLU’s amicus brief, just as an employer cannot fire a pregnant employee based on unfounded stereotypes about her capacity to work, the state of Texas cannot impose a harsher punishment on Ms. Lovill because of its archaic and unfounded view that pregnant women lack the capacity to address their drug use. 

No less disturbing was the State's argument that its harsher treatment of Ms. Lovill was necessary in order to protect fetal health.  Assistant District Attorney Douglas K. Norman told the court that it is the State's job to protect the health of mothers and newborns.  This is a laudable goal, but when the State's idea of protecting a pregnant woman’s health is to unfairly use the criminal justice system to throw her in jail, it becomes a dangerous idea instead.  The State’s view rests on a fundamental misconception that jailing a pregnant woman benefits maternal and fetal health.  This view has been so thoroughly debunked that fifty-two medical, public health, and child welfare experts and advocates filed an amicus brief on Ms. Lovill’s behalf explaining the serious harms of using punishment and incarceration to address drug use during pregnancy.  The State's position in Ms. Lovill’s case today should ring alarm bells for all Texas women.  Hopefully the Court of Criminal Appeals is listening.