Mississippi Today
They Were Prosecuted for Using Drugs While Pregnant. But It May Not Have Been a Crime

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.
Spencer Woods wanted to fight a crime that didn’t exist.
As a sheriff’s investigator in Monroe County, Mississippi, near the Alabama border, he would occasionally receive reports from his state’s child protection agency that a baby had tested positive for illegal drugs at birth.
To Woods, the mothers had endangered their fetuses and should face criminal charges. But unlike some other southern states, Mississippi law doesn’t define a fetus as a person; in fact, voters had rejected a ballot measure to do just that more than a decade ago.
So when Woods would receive these referrals, he had to effectively place them in the trash.
“We were coming across those type [of] things that I considered to be child abuse, but as far as the statute, the state wasn’t recognizing that as actual child abuse,” Woods said in an interview.
That’s until 2019, when Woods decided that his office would take matters into its own hands and pursue child endangerment cases against the women anyway. He argued that child abuse can, in fact, take place inside the womb, challenging anyone to prove otherwise.
Through news reports and court records, Mississippi Today identified 44 cases in which law enforcement officers in Mississippi have arrested women for a crime that, based on existing state law, they may not have actually committed.
“The state of Mississippi does not look at a child as being a child until it draws its first breath,” Woods said. “Well, when that child tests positive when it’s born, the abuse has already happened, and it didn’t happen to a ‘child.’ So it was a crack in the system, the way I looked at it. And that’s where we’re kind of playing.”
While medical experts warn against drug use during pregnancy, they point out that not all babies exposed to drugs in the womb are born with medical problems. But Woods said that he doesn’t need evidence of harm to the fetus — just a positive drug test — to pursue a child endangerment case.
Monroe County has accounted for 12 of the 44 cases we found. Woods said he was unaware that 200 miles to the south of his jurisdiction, officials in Jones County had already been filing similar charges against mothers for years, Mississippi Today reported in 2019. All but three of the cases Mississippi Today identified from 2015 to 2023 came from Monroe and Jones, two small rural counties.
While Monroe County has offered leniency in keeping these women out of prison, Jones County’s lone judge, Circuit Court Judge Dal Williamson, has given at least six women long prison sentences for using drugs while pregnant. The difference in sentencing stems in part from the counties charging women under different sections of the child abuse law. Monroe County has utilized the child endangerment section that bars parents from allowing their children to be present around drugs, such as in meth labs. Meanwhile, Jones County has charged women in similar circumstances with poisoning their fetuses. Williamson ordered the women to serve between two and 15 years in prison.

“I don’t understand how in the world a mother expecting a child would continue to pour this poison in their body,” Williamson said at a sentencing last year, according to the local newspaper Laurel Leader-Call. “Your baby can’t say, ‘No, mama, stop.’”
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.
Woods’ strategy has never been tested in court, because each of the 12 women his office has arrested have pleaded guilty under diversion or probation deals that keep them out of prison.
Defense lawyers said they would like to take a case to trial, but their clients are reluctant. “They’re not wanting to take that risk of going to trial and getting convicted because they’re all fighting to get their kids back,” said Luanne Thompson, one of two public defenders in Monroe County who has handled these cases. “That is the dilemma that they’re in.”
Most of Thompson’s clients have received “non-adjudicated” sentences, meaning they avoid prison and their records will be cleared if they satisfy the terms of their probation.
Public health experts fear that the threat of prosecution could dissuade pregnant people from seeking prenatal care at a time when the state is facing growing threats to the health of newborns. Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate in the nation, at roughly 9 deaths per 1,000 live births.
Cases of infant hospitalizations in Mississippi related to drug exposure in the womb have skyrocketed from more than 300 cases in 2015, when Jones County began prosecuting these cases, to four times that in 2021, at a high of more than 1,200.
State Health Officer Daniel Edney has vowed to address these issues. His department compiled a recent report that identified the uptick in drug-exposed newborns. The report blamed the increase on changes in diagnostic coding at hospitals, as well as rising substance abuse due to the isolation and reduced access to therapy people experienced during the coronavirus pandemic.
But Edney, a longtime addiction specialist, was shocked to learn from recent reporting by The Marshall Project and Mississippi Today about local prosecutions of mothers not unlike his own patients.
“I thought, ‘This is archaic,’” Edney said. “There are a lot of medical conditions that if a pregnant mom doesn't take care of herself, it hurts the baby. This is the one disease that we’ll incarcerate a woman for.”
He warns that prosecuting moms with substance use disorders as child abusers will only deter them from seeking care, making it harder for the medical community to do its job.
“We don't need law enforcement going in to arrest women who are trying to get help,” Edney said. “It has a chilling effect on the women out there who are trying to decide what they need to do.”
Though Mississippi officials enacted and defended the state abortion prohibition that ultimately led to the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last year, the state does not recognize “fetal personhood.” In 2011, Mississippi voters rejected an amendment to the state constitution proposed by anti-abortion activists that would have defined a fertilized egg as a person.
The Mississippi Supreme Court has twice taken up the issue — through two cases in which local officers charged women with murder or manslaughter after losing their pregnancies in 2006 and 2009. Both times, justices wrote ambiguous opinions, and the lower courts ultimately threw charges out in both cases.
Mississippi’s abortion prohibition doesn’t criminalize pregnant people, nor does it treat abortion as murder. The law stipulates prison terms only for the person who performed the abortion, not the woman who sought it. Bills filed in the Mississippi Legislature to criminalize drug use while pregnant under the state’s child abuse statute have died with little attention. Despite those failed efforts, the sheriff’s investigator in Monroe County decided his department needed to act.
“We're eventually gonna have to deal with possibly the Supreme Court or possibly the state Legislature on changing the law, hopefully,” Woods said.
He said he realizes that his tactic may have implications for reproductive rights.
“I always had to keep that in the back of my mind, the Roe v. Wade type stuff, what women can do with their bodies,” Woods said. “That was never my argument. My argument was always what was best for the child. I discussed it with my assistant district attorney, who is a woman, and she had my back on this, and we went forward with it.”
But a growing body of research shows that what’s best for the health of newborns is critical bonding with their mother.
“We have to balance the health and safety of that baby while also trying to make sure that family stays connected,” said Dr. Anita Henderson, a Hattiesburg pediatrician and president of the Mississippi chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “If you’re trying to reunify families or make that mom or that family as healthy as possible, then the goal should be treatment. ... Incarceration and the threat of incarceration have proven to be ineffective.”
Christina Dent, who has cared for children in Mississippi’s foster care system as a result of their mothers’ drug addictions, supports the concept of fetal personhood and is personally against abortion. She’s also the founder of End It For Good, a nonprofit that advocates for the legalization of drugs. Dent’s group argues that criminalizing drugs only increases harm to people and society. She said that treating these mothers as criminals is “opposed to a pro-life ethic” and leads to worse outcomes for both the mother and baby.
“I would say, yes, that [fetus] is a child,” Dent said, speaking for herself and not on behalf of her organization. “And because of that, shouldn’t we do everything possible to protect that child from further harm, help the mother access prenatal care, and protect the bond of this little family?”
Monroe County Sheriff Kevin Crook has earned a reputation for taking a compassionate approach to drug offenses, placing an emphasis on treatment and rehabilitation. In Crook’s view, though, the threat of prison motivates people to take recovery seriously.
“We gotta have something for these people to run into,” Crook said, “or they're not just gonna stop on their own.”
Woods agreed. “I'm not really trying to put these women in prison,” he said. “What I'm trying to do is correct the issue. We do offer counseling and rehab and those types of things.”
But the investigator acknowledged there’s never enough mental health services to cover the need. He also couldn’t say how effective his strategy is; he doesn’t have any data to show how many mothers he’s arrested have gotten clean or reunited with their children.
Woods said he also believes that smoking or drinking alcohol while pregnant — which can produce similar if not more harmful effects as controlled substances on a fetus’ development — constitutes child abuse.
He’s aware his approach could be applied to other activities that might endanger a fetus. “Of course, you keep going, ‘You're eating too much sugar. You’re ingesting too much caffeine.’ Where do you stop with it?” Woods said.
He draws the line at illegal substances. “I have to go by statutes,” he said. “I can’t just decide what I want to.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Derrick Simmons: Monday’s Confederate Memorial Day recognition is awful for Mississippians
Editor’s note: This essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.
Each year, in a handful of states, public offices close, flags are lowered and official ceremonies commemorate “Confederate Memorial Day.”
Mississippi is among those handful of states that on Monday will celebrate the holiday intended to honor the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
But let me be clear: celebrating Confederate Memorial Day is not only racist but is bad policy, bad governance and a deep stain on the values we claim to uphold today.
First, there is no separating the Confederacy from the defense of slavery and white supremacy. The Confederacy was not about “states’ rights” in the abstract; it was about the right to own human beings. Confederate leaders themselves made that clear.
Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens declared in his infamous “Cornerstone Speech” that the Confederacy was founded upon “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” No amount of revisionist history can erase the fact that the Confederacy’s cause was fundamentally rooted in preserving racial subjugation.
To honor that cause with a state holiday is to glorify a rebellion against the United States fought to defend the indefensible. It is an insult to every citizen who believes in equality and freedom, and it is a cruel slap in the face to Black Americans, whose ancestors endured the horrors of slavery and generations of systemic discrimination that followed.
Beyond its moral bankruptcy, Confederate Memorial Day is simply bad public policy. Holidays are public statements of our values. They are moments when a state, through official sanction, tells its citizens: “This is what we believe is worthy of honor.” Keeping Confederate Memorial Day on the calendar sends a message that a government once committed to denying basic human rights should be celebrated.
That message is not just outdated — it is dangerous. It nurtures the roots of racism, fuels division and legitimizes extremist ideologies that threaten our democracy today.
Moreover, there are real economic and administrative costs to shutting down government offices for this purpose. In a time when states face budget constraints, workforce shortages and urgent civic challenges, it is absurd to prioritize paid time off to commemorate a failed and racist insurrection. Our taxpayer dollars should be used to advance justice, education, infrastructure and economic development — not to prop up a lost cause of hate.
If we truly believe in moving forward together as one people, we must stop clinging to symbols that represent treason, brutality and white supremacy. There is a legislative record that supports this move in a veto-proof majority changing the state Confederate flag in 2020. Taking Confederate Memorial Day off our official state holiday calendar is another necessary step toward a more inclusive and just society.
Mississippi had the largest population of enslaved individuals in 1865 and today has the highest percentage of Black residents in the United States. We should not honor the Confederacy or Confederate Memorial Day. We should replace it.
Replacing a racist holiday with one that celebrates emancipation underscores the state’s rich African American history and promotes a more inclusive understanding of its past. It would also align the state’s observances with national efforts to commemorate the end of slavery and the ongoing pursuit of equality.
I will continue my legislative efforts to replace Confederate Memorial Day as a state holiday with Juneteenth, which commemorates the freedom for America’s enslaved people.
It’s time to end Confederate Memorial Day once and for all.
Derrick T. Simmons, D-Greensville, serves as the minority leader in the state Senate. He represents Bolivar, Coahoma and Washington counties in the Mississippi Senate.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The post Derrick Simmons: Monday's Confederate Memorial Day recognition is awful for Mississippians appeared first on mississippitoday.org
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Left-Leaning
This article argues against the celebration of Confederate Memorial Day, stating it glorifies a racist and failed rebellion that is harmful to societal values. It critiques the holiday as a symbol of white supremacy and advocates for replacing it with Juneteenth to honor emancipation. The language used, such as referring to the Confederate cause as “moral bankruptcy,” and the call to replace the holiday reflects a progressive stance on social justice and racial equality, common in left-leaning perspectives. Additionally, the writer urges action for inclusivity and justice, positioning the argument within modern liberal values.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois urged active resistance to racist policies
April 27, 1903

W.E.B. Du Bois, in his book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” called for active resistance to racist policies: “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.”
He described the tension between being Black and being an American: “One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
He criticized Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Six years later, Du Bois helped found the NAACP and became the editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis. He waged protests against the racist silent film “The Birth of a Nation” and against lynchings of Black Americans, detailing the 2,732 lynchings between 1884 and 1914.
In 1921, he decried Harvard University’s decisions to ban Black students from the dormitories as an attempt to renew “the Anglo-Saxon cult, the worship of the Nordic totem, the disenfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic and South Sea Islander — the world rule of Nordic white through brute force.”
In 1929, he debated Lothrop Stoddard, a proponent of scientific racism, who also happened to belong to the Ku Klux Klan. The Chicago Defender’s front page headline read, “5,000 Cheer W.E.B. DuBois, Laugh at Lothrup Stoddard.”
In 1949, the FBI began to investigate Du Bois as a “suspected Communist,” and he was indicted on trumped-up charges that he had acted as an agent of a foreign state and had failed to register. The government dropped the case after Albert Einstein volunteered to testify as a character witness.
Despite the lack of conviction, the government confiscated his passport for eight years. In 1960, he recovered his passport and traveled to the newly created Republic of Ghana. Three years later, the U.S. government refused to renew his passport, so Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana. He died on Aug. 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Mississippi Today
Jim Hood’s opinion provides a roadmap if lawmakers do the unthinkable and can’t pass a budget
On June 30, 2009, Sam Cameron, the then-executive director of the Mississippi Hospital Association, held a news conference in the Capitol rotunda to publicly take his whipping and accept his defeat.
Cameron urged House Democrats, who had sided with the Hospital Association, to accept the demands of Republican Gov. Haley Barbour to place an additional $90 million tax on the state’s hospitals to help fund Medicaid and prevent the very real possibility of the program and indeed much of state government being shut down when the new budget year began in a few hours. The impasse over Medicaid and the hospital tax had stopped all budget negotiations.
Barbour watched from a floor above as Cameron publicly admitted defeat. Cameron’s decision to swallow his pride was based on a simple equation. He told news reporters, scores of lobbyists and health care advocates who had set up camp in the Capitol as midnight on July 1 approached that, while he believed the tax would hurt Mississippi hospitals, not having a Medicaid budget would be much more harmful.
Just as in 2009, the Legislature ended the 2025 regular session earlier this month without a budget agreement and will have to come back in special session to adopt a budget before the new fiscal year begins on July 1. It is unlikely that the current budget rift between the House and Senate will be as dramatic as the 2009 standoff when it appeared only hours before the July 1 deadline that there would be no budget. But who knows what will result from the current standoff? After all, the current standoff in many ways seems to be more about political egos than policy differences on the budget.
The fight centers around multiple factors, including:
- Whether legislation will be passed to allow sports betting outside of casinos.
- Whether the Senate will agree to a massive projects bill to fund local projects throughout the state.
- Whether leaders will overcome hard feelings between the two chambers caused by the House’s hasty final passage of a Senate tax cut bill filled with typos that altered the intent of the bill without giving the Senate an opportunity to fix the mistakes.
- Whether members would work on a weekend at the end of the session. The Senate wanted to, the House did not.
It is difficult to think any of those issues will rise to the ultimate level of preventing the final passage of a budget when push comes to shove.
But who knows? What we do know is that the impasse in 2009 created a guideline of what could happen if a budget is not passed.
It is likely that parts, though not all, of state government will shut down if the Legislature does the unthinkable and does not pass a budget for the new fiscal year beginning July 1.
An official opinion of the office of Attorney General Jim Hood issued in 2009 said if there is no budget passed by the Legislature, those services mandated in the Mississippi Constitution, such as a public education system, will continue.
According to the Hood opinion, other entities, such as the state’s debt, and court and federal mandates, also would be funded. But it is likely that there will not be funds for Medicaid and many other programs, such as transportation and aspects of public safety that are not specifically listed in the Mississippi Constitution.
The Hood opinion reasoned that the Mississippi Constitution is the ultimate law of the state and must be adhered to even in the absence of legislative action. Other states have reached similar conclusions when their legislatures have failed to act, the AG’s opinion said.
As is often pointed out, the opinion of the attorney general does not carry the weight of law. It serves only as a guideline, though Gov. Tate Reeves has relied on the 2009 opinion even though it was written by the staff of Hood, who was Reeves’ opponent in the contentious 2019 gubernatorial campaign.
But if the unthinkable ever occurs and the Legislature goes too far into a new fiscal year without adopting a budget, it most likely will be the courts — moreso than an AG’s opinion — that ultimately determine if and how state government operates.
In 2009 Sam Cameron did not want to see what would happen if a budget was not adopted. It also is likely that current political leaders do not want to see the results of not having a budget passed before July 1 of this year.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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