Tens of Thousands of New Mothers Have Been Flagged to Police Over Unreliable Drug Tests

[AZProgressive]

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What happened to Harris-Rashid is happening to women across the country with staggering frequency. In at least 70,000 cases in 21 states, parents were referred to law enforcement agencies over allegations of substance use during pregnancy, according to six years of state and federal data obtained and published for the first time by the Marshall Project. In many cases, the referrals began with false positive results from flawed drug tests—sometimes triggered by women’s prescribed medications.

The sheer number of people whom law enforcement is tracking is far higher than experts previously knew, including academics and reproductive rights organizations monitoring what they call pregnancy criminalization. Even so, the numbers the Marshall Project compiled represent a significant undercount.

“My initial genuine reaction is, frankly, shock and dismay,” said Dana Sussman, senior vice president of the legal advocacy organization Pregnancy Justice, which counted more than 1,800 pregnancy-related arrests and prosecutions from 2006 through 2024. She added, “This represents an incredibly regressive and counterproductive approach.”

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Many of the women who tested positive likely used illicit drugs. But data from three states that specifically track cases involving prescriptions show that thousands of new mothers were referred to law enforcement based solely on medications their doctors gave them.

https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2026/02/tens-of-thousands-of-new-mothers-have-been-flagged-to-police-over-unreliable-drug-tests/

Whole article is worth reading but I snipped some relevant paragraphs on what the article is about.