Dear Meteor readers,

We’re coming to you today with a remarkable story.

Lauren Smith is a mother of three in South Carolina now facing up to ten years in prison—for having smoked marijuana to alleviate her symptoms while pregnant with her youngest child.

Smith’s case sounds nightmarish, but it’s not uncommon in post-Roe America, where fetal personhood laws have enabled prosecutors to more easily penalize pregnant people for their actions. Over the last five months, journalist Neda Toloui-Semnani has investigated this new legal environment, its implications, and Smith’s fight to keep her family together.

UNITED STATES OF ABORTION

“I Didn’t Feel Like a Mother. I Felt Like a Criminal.”

BY NEDA TOLOUI-SEMNANI

GREENVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA

Lauren Smith thought she knew what to expect as she was rushed into the operating room. At 26, it was her third cesarean section.

“I don’t remember much before or after because everything moved so fast,” she says. “I remember crying. I remember being cold and being wheeled in there, and then, laying back, and then, I remember looking at the clock. It was at an angle.” The surgeon cut her open and pulled out a squirming infant, a baby girl Smith would name Audrey. Delivered a month early, she was a strong, healthy, kicking-screaming, six-pound, five-ounce newborn.

Smith thought she knew what would come next. But like a character in a Kafka tale, her world had shifted while she slept.

The same day she delivered—February 18, 2019—a urine drug screen confirmed that she had used marijuana during her pregnancy. The next morning, Audrey’s meconium, the first stools voided by an infant, tested positive for THC, a compound found in marijuana.

Three nights later, as Smith, who is Black, prepared to leave the hospital, a case worker and a lawyer from the Department of Social Services told her that because she had tested positive for THC, she could not take her new baby home.

That’s when she started to scream.

She was alone in the hospital room, the phone to her ear, sutures across her abdomen. She kept asking for someone—anyone—to explain what was happening. “I just remember nobody was there to speak for me,” Smith recalls. “I couldn’t even really speak for myself.”

“I didn’t feel like a mother,” she says, “or a person who just had a baby. I didn’t feel like a victim. I felt like a criminal.” She said goodbye to her baby that night.

Six months later, Smith would be arrested and charged with felony child neglect for using marijuana while she was pregnant with Audrey—a crime that, in South Carolina, carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison. Through a complex sequence of events, the charge also led to her losing custody of her second child, Aiden, for two years. Smith’s trial has been pushed back again and again; as of publication, it is set for February 19, 2024.

FOLLOW THE METEOR

Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? Sign up for your own copy, sent Tuesdays and Thursdays.

[email protected]