Stone-Manista on Child Abuse Prosecutions of Pregnant Drug Addicts

Krista Stone-Manista has posted Protecting Pregnant Women: A Guide to Successfully Challenging Criminal Child Abuse Prosecutions of Pregnant Drug Addicts (Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 99, No. 3, 2009) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This Comment is intended to enable advocates for pregnant women to challenge the impermissible and unconstitutional prosecutions of pregnant drug users for criminal child abuse and endangerment. The Comment surveys the history of such prosecutions, and considers the policy justifications for them, before turning to an analysis of the frameworks that state appellate and supreme courts have applied in holding that these prosecutions may not proceed under various state laws. In summarizing the various challenges that may be brought to criminal prosecutions of pregnant drug addicts, this Comment illuminates the tactics that have been successful in previous cases, and offers various notes for those challenging future prosecutions.