Recent reporting by AL.com on Alabama mothers criminalized for taking drugs while pregnant has been named a finalist for a national journalism award through the American Society of Magazine Editors.

The project featured several stories and involved five newsrooms. AL.com reporter Amy Yurkanin’s 2023 story “How One Alabama County Declared War on Pregnant Women Who Use Drugs” focused on Etowah County.

Yurkanin also helped with the national overview “These States Are Using Fetal Personhood to Put Women Behind Bars” in partnership with The Marshall Project, The Frontier in Oklahoma, Mississippi Today and the Post & Courier in South Caolina. The story also was published in The Guardian.

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled in 2013 it is legal to criminally prosecute women whose babies are born with drugs in their bodies. Yurkanin found that while Alabama leads the nation in such arrests, no county does more to locate, jail and keep new mothers behind bars than Etowah County.

An AL.com analysis of Alabama court records and interviews with local officials, lawyers, advocates and the women who have been arrested revealed that Etowah County officials specifically focus on pregnant women.

The third stroy included in the entry was “They Were Prosecuted for Using Drugs While Pregnant. But It May Not Have Been a Crime,” by Anna Wolfe at Mississippi Today.

The project is a finalist alongside work including the look at the seafood industry by the New Yorker and Outlaw Ocean Project, the examination of contaminated eyedrops by Bloomberg, and the reporting on large gifts to Supreme Court justices by ProPublica.

Winners for the National Magazine Awards for magazine storytelling will be announced on Tuesday, April 2

“The astonishing variety of this year’s National Magazine Award nominees demonstrates the vitality of magazine journalism, whether the outlet is a print magazine, a website, a podcast or even a newspaper,” said Sidney Holt, the executive director of ASME in a press release on Friday.

The awards are sponsored through the society and the Columbia School of Journalism. Other publications nominated for awards include The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic and ProPublica.