Chelsea Stewart waited on the bench of a north Alabama court in early 2019, holding tight to the big news she hoped might get her out of trouble.

Gadsden police had caught Stewart, then 20 years old, smoking marijuana outside her house a month earlier. It was the first time she’d been arrested, so the prosecutor offered a deal.

In exchange for testing clean in a series of random drug screens, Stewart's charges would be dropped and she’d avoid jail. But less than two weeks later, at her first screening, the officer who collected her urine delivered bad news: She tested positive for marijuana.

“I said, ‘Well yeah, there hasn’t been enough time for me to get it out of my system,’” Stewart recalled.

In court, Stewart was still hopeful. She attempted to sway the prosecutor by telling her about all the good things going on in her life. Then the big reveal: “I told them that I was pregnant, thinking it would help me,” Stewart recalled.

“I think, OK, I’ll tell them I work for the country club. I have a great job,” Stewart told AL.com. “I’m getting into bartending, and now I’m pregnant. Maybe they’ll feel sorry for me. I was just really unaware of how the system worked, and the way things were.”

The prosecutor silently jotted a couple words down on a sticky note and passed it to the judge, Stewart said. The judge sent her to jail for five days for failing the drug test.

Six years before her arrest, Etowah County officials had embarked on an unprecedented crackdown on pregnant drug users. Alabama lawmakers in 2006 created the chemical endangerment law to protect children from meth lab hazards, but Etowah and a handful of other counties apply the law to alleged hazards in the womb from drug use.

For smoking marijuana, Stewart found that she had become something both disgraceful and common: another pregnant woman headed for jail in Etowah County.

Read the full article about jailing pregnant women for drug use by Amy Yurkanin at The Marshall Project.