Prosecutors in some Alabama counties pursue charges against women who test positive for marijuana during pregnancy or after birth.

One county in Alabama stands apart in this fight.

Etowah County in the northeast part of the state prosecutes more women for drug use during pregnancy than any other, jailing some pregnant women who used only marijuana.

Here are three of their stories:

Police arrested Chelsea Stewart in 2019 for smoking marijuana in front of her home, a misdemeanor charge that snowballed into a felony after she found out she was pregnant.

Stewart said she stopped smoking marijuana after her arrest and didn’t find out she was expecting until weeks later. However, marijuana can linger in the system, and she tested positive at her first random screening.

“At the time, I was unaware of me being pregnant,” Stewart said.

She told the prosecutor she was pregnant, hoping to get some sympathy and possibly a lighter sanction. Instead, court officials announced her pregnancy in court and took her to jail.

“They were extremely packed, and it was extremely embarrassing,” she said.

Stewart, who suffered from morning sickness, spent a month in jail, dealing with nausea and struggling to get the extra meal portions for pregnant women. She did not get sent for prenatal appointments, she said.

“In my head, I’m becoming a first-time mom,” Stewart said. “I’m dealing with all this stuff. I just want to protect me and this little baby I’ve got inside of me.”

That proved difficult during her month-long stay in jail, where she witnessed drug use and regular attacks on other inmates. At one point, she got caught in the middle of a clash between inmates and jailers and wound up caught in a cell filled with pepper spray.

After a month, she moved to a halfway house in Eastaboga. Stewart, who was 20 years old at the time, said she was surrounded by women with serious addiction.

She had never used anything harder than marijuana, she said. Her cellmates had years of opioid and meth use. The experience was stressful and expensive.

“I spent more than $3,000 on that,” Stewart said. “I could have been saving for my daughter. I could have been saving for anything, and I wasn’t.”

She gave birth in late September and her daughter was born healthy. Stewart gushes about how advanced she is for her age, but still worries that the stress she endured while pregnant might have left faint marks on her daughter.

The girl refused to eat purees offered during infancy and still struggles with food.

“In jail, I could not eat,” she said. “I still have an appetite like that. And if you go that long being completely starving to picking at things. I truly would go days without eating. Because of that and then going through the rehab and not eating and not having a consistent diet, my daughter does not have a consistent diet.”

THC and a trip to jail

In early 2021, Amanda Bradley found herself unexpectedly pregnant. She had chronic pain that had been treated with suboxone, an opioid better known as a treatment for addiction. She went off it when she became pregnant and said she started using CBD oil for symptoms of withdrawal.

Although CBD oil is not supposed to contain THC, the compound that causes users to feel high, certain types contain trace amounts. Researchers have found that broad spectrum CBD oil can trigger positive drug tests. When Bradley gave birth, she tested positive for THC.

“The CBD oil they sold at the store, I didn’t know it would make me fail for marijuana,” Bradley said. “It seemed like a natural, safe option. That’s why I did it. I didn’t know you could get in trouble for stuff you bought from the store.”

Bradley, who has no prior felonies on her record, spent two months in the Etowah County Jail. She was still bleeding from giving birth when she was booked.

In her first substance use assessment, her use of CBD oil didn’t qualify for rehab. But under the rules imposed by the court in Etowah County, she couldn’t leave jail unless she went to a drug treatment facility.

“I went back and ended up redoing the assessment and telling them I shoot up and all kinds of stuff to get to rehab and it worked,” Bradley said.

Bradley spent two months in jail and another six months at the rehab center. In all, she was separated from her children for eight months.

“My kids are completely traumatized from it,” she said.

Inside Unit 7

Daisy Daughtry, 32, wasn’t at the best point in her life when she found out she was pregnant again. She lived with her boyfriend and two children in Gadsden in a barebones trailer.

Her boyfriend reacted badly when she told him the news. It would be her fifth child. She said she began smoking marijuana to fight the stress and morning sickness.

“I was scared to go to the doctor at first,” Daughtry said. “And I was constantly throwing up, so I ended up smoking. And from there I was able to eat a little more. Hold a little more down.”

Daughtry began going into early labor at around six months in June of 2020. The baby, who weighed nearly 5 pounds, was born premature and with medical complications. The child was whisked away to Huntsville Hospital for special care soon after her birth.

Social workers told Daughtry the next day her the baby had tested positive for marijuana and removed all her children from the home, citing her drug use and the condition of the trailer.

Daughtry spent almost all of 2021 in jail on the felony charge that sprang from that positive marijuana test at birth. Most of the time she wasn’t in jail, she spent in drug rehabilitation.

“Yeah, I smoked weed,” Daughtry told AL.com. “I deserve punishment. I should have some punishment for it. But to take my kids away from me. To tear my world apart. To make me sit in that godawful jail. I have never experienced something so horrible in my entire life.”

The court kept her in jail for three months, then sent her to drug rehab. She did not fail a drug test but got kicked out for meeting up with her ex at her daughter’s birthday party. The cycle repeated itself one more time at another rehab, one which treats substance use disorder with unconventional methods that include Christian dance therapy.

In all, she spent a year in jail and rehab. During that time, she couldn’t fight the state’s efforts to terminate her parental rights, which happened just weeks after she was finally released to drug court.

“I thought, ‘I’m going to show this judge that I’m going to complete this and I’m going to do everything that I told him that I was going to do in the beginning,’” Daughtry said. “If he would have just let me out, I would have had my kids.”

These days she works two jobs. One of them is at a local zoo, where she hopes she might see one of her children.

She has now been clean for more than three years. She said it’s hard to celebrate the milestone since the termination of her parental rights.

“I don’t feel like it’s a big proud moment for me,” Daughtry said. “I still lost my kids.”