Salutations, Meteor readers,

Last week, Denali National Park started weighing its husky puppies for Chunky Puppy Day. Six-month-old Mammoth was crowned the winner at a stunning 77 pounds. Animals are wonderful.

THE DENALI PUPPIES ENJOYING THE SUMMER BEFORE THE GREAT CHUNKENING. MAMMOTH IS SECOND FROM THE LEFT. (SCREENSHOT VIA INSTAGRAM)

In today’s newsletter, a long-awaited update on Lauren Smith, almost three years after we first reported on how the South Carolina mom was facing 10 years in prison because of a positive THC test. Plus, three questions with author Gemma Hartley about her latest book, No One Loves an Angry Woman. (We do!)

With love,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

“I’m trying to rebuild”: In November 2023, The Meteor published an investigation into the case of Lauren Smith, a South Carolina mother of three who was staring down a ten-year prison sentence after she and her newborn tested positive for THC. Her youngest baby, Audrey, was taken away from Smith the day after she was born. Alone in that hospital room, “I didn’t feel like a mother,” she told writer Neda Toloui-Semnani, “or a person who just had a baby. I didn’t feel like a victim. I felt like a criminal.” Smith was later arrested and charged with felony child neglect for using marijuana while pregnant. (While cannabis use during pregnancy isn’t recommended, it’s common among young women, especially those, like Smith, who experience extreme morning sickness.) The charge also led to her losing custody of her second child, Aiden, for two years.

These cases are only becoming more common post-Dobbs, as more states embrace the concept of “fetal personhood.” In those states, “pregnant people have fewer rights than people who aren’t pregnant,” Trip Carpenter, a legal fellow with Pregnancy Justice, which supported Smith, explained in 2023.

At the time our story was published, Smith was still awaiting her day in court. She had rejected a plea deal; “I don’t believe in pleading to something I didn’t do,” she said. But in 2024, after years of waiting, her case finally went to trial—and resulted in a hung jury. Then, this year, Smith learned that the state did not plan to retry the case. Her charges were expunged.

“I felt elated, like one of the dark clouds that have been looming over me for almost a decade has finally subsided and moved on,” she says. Smith, now 34, shares an apartment with nine-year-old Aiden in Greenville, S.C. She works as a caregiver for older adults, and she’s going to school for medical billing and coding. Last week, she and Aiden traveled to New York, where Pregnancy Justice honored her courage and persistence at their annual gala. (Smith and her son also, fittingly, glimpsed the Statue of Liberty while riding the Staten Island ferry.)

Still, the victory is “bittersweet,” she says. After having her life on hold for seven years, “I’m trying to rebuild and figure out who I am…It’s a lot and it’s a struggle right now.” She still doesn’t have custody of or even a visitation agreement for Audrey, who lives with her paternal grandmother; it’s been several months since Smith last saw her. “It’s hard because I don’t have a lot of control over the situation,” she says.

LAUREN SMITH RECEIVES AN AWARD FROM PREGNANCY JUSTICE’S DANA SUSSMAN LAST MONTH. (PHOTO BY YEKA GYADU FOR PREGNANCY JUSTICE) 

Even Smith’s relationship with Aiden has taken a hit from the turmoil of the last few years. Recently, after Smith took away Aiden’s Xbox privileges for a punishment, he told her, “That’s why I wish Rebecca was my mom.” (Rebecca is a family friend who was his foster parent for those two years.) “He’s nine, so he doesn’t probably know how to really express his feelings,” Smith says. “It comes out in anger.”

Karen Thompson, Pregnancy Justice’s legal director, says this kind of “community destruction and family interruption,” a typical kind of havoc that pregnancy criminalization wreaks, is “really one of the true takeaways from Lauren’s situation.” And Thompson thinks that even relatively positive outcomes like Smith’s are becoming less possible. Post-Dobbs, “prosecutions are getting much more intense. There’s more of them. The surveillance [of pregnant women] is increasing. And…there are not a lot of people like Lauren who are willing to fight.” Thompson says the system makes the process “so unbearable” that most people end up taking plea deals. “That’s the flare that’s getting sent out: Behave, and be quiet.”

That’s not advice Lauren Smith will be taking. “My own father at one point told me to just give up” on the case, she says. “But you just got to keep pushing through…You have to start with the truth and go from there.”

—Nona Willis Aronowitz

AND:

• Bernadette Greene-Placentia, a congressional candidate in Arizona, says that over the summer she was raped by two men while repairing some of her campaign signs. She says that when the incident took place, she was initially “embarrassed” to tell anyone what happened. But then she did something incredibly brave: She told her story in the midst of a heated election. “I don’t want my campaign to be about this,” she told The New York Times, “but women need to know it’s OK to come forward.”

• Another Democrat running for office has turned their back on the transgender community. Annie Andrews, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina, released an ad referring to trans women as “biological men,” and also confirmed to the SC Daily Gazette that she won’t be seeking to overturn the state’s youth HRT and puberty blocker ban. (Annie, we thought you were better than this.) Journalist Erin Reed has been maintaining a tracker of anti-trans Democrats by state.

• Margaret Hamilton, a programmer known as “The Rope Mother” whose software helped land astronauts on the moon for the first time, has died at 90 years old.

MARGARET HAMILTON BESIDE A STACK OF PRINTED CODE USED FOR THE 1969 MOON LANDING. (NASA/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)

• Could we be nearing the end of the death penalty in the U.S.? Thee Pamela Colloff explains the last 30 years of capital punishment in the wake of Christa Pike’s botched execution.

• Yesterday marked a full decade since the release of the infamous Access Hollywood video, in which soon-to-be-President Trump uttered the phrase “Grab ‘em by the pussy.” 🤮I feel ill, Nona can take it from here:

• Today is Latina Equal Pay Day, the day in the year Latine women would have to work up to in order to catch up with what white men made the previous year. On average, Latine women are paid 53 cents for every dollar a man earns. This wage gap has only narrowed by seven cents since 1990.

Three Questions About…Holy Rage

COURTESY OF BEACON PRESS

Did the women of the Bible—the ones so many of us are told to model our lives after—ever get angry? Did Mary, the mother of Jesus, ever mutter under her breath that he was an obnoxious little shit when he was going through his threenager phase? These are the burning questions two ex-evangelicals—that would be me and Gemma Hartley, author of No One Loves an Angry Woman: An Ex-Evangelical Coming of Rage Story—discuss when they’re alone on a Zoom.

So one of the things we’re taught very early on is that we need to learn to be like the Sarahs and Marys and Ruths of the Bible—women who were sort of humbled by the world so that they could learn the importance of submission. But we see them as success stories because once they submitted, everything was great. Do you think those gals felt anger? 

Gemma Hartley: I can’t imagine that they didn’t. I can’t imagine that they would not harbor a deep anger for the ways that they were denied full personhood. They aren’t full people on the page, right? They’re archetypes. They are showing us what “good” womanhood looks like, just like the Jezebels and the Vashtis are showing us what “bad” womanhood looks like. And so there’s no way for us to see them in their full humanity. So I think that the anger might have come out sideways for these women. I think that in order to keep submission to one man, one faith system, anger has to get redirected somewhere else. And I don’t know where that is, but I do believe it was there.

Do you think there’s something hyper-specific about evangelicism that plants the seed of this kind of anger for women?

I think that Christian patriarchy [of all kinds] tells women to suppress their anger and act in a way that is not in accordance with how we feel. Every time you don’t allow yourself to express anger, it builds up. When I say that this [book] is a coming-of-rage story, it’s that moment of inflection where you can’t hide it anymore, where you can’t press it down any further. All of it has to come up in order for you to reckon with it.

I think Abrahamic religions in general do this to women because they put you in a very small box—It separates you from your body. It separates you from your sense of justice. And those things make it really difficult for you to become fully human in a way. Women are told that our sinful nature…needs to be shaved away. But really it’s just your sense of self, your sense of justice, your sense of something isn’t right here that they’re chipping away from you.

I do think that there is a way for women to walk in faith and not accept that diminishment of their humanity. It’s really difficult because you have to walk a path that is not well-worn in order to do that.

Is there anyone that you wish we knew more about that could be a defiant woman archetype? 

Queen Vashti. 100 percent. And I kind of mythologize her in the book a little bit because, as someone who has gone through sexual assault, what we are given of her story is so difficult to grapple with. What we’re told of her story is that she’s vain and disobedient and had to be cast out.

But when you look at what the disobedience is…The king [and Vashti are having separate feasts], there has been drinking and debauchery going on for days. Vashti is with the women and is called to come before the king and all of the men, very likely without clothing. She refuses to appear and is then put to death.

The full story of her humanity is completely written over by men that just say, “Well, she was disobedient to the king. We need to make an example of her.” I think she would have a story that would be so familiar to so many of us.

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