Five years after giving birth to a baby girl in 2019, Mississippi mother Brandy Moore was arrested for "aggravated domestic violence" based on a postnatal drug test. The timing was puzzling, and so was the legal reasoning of the prosecutor who accused Moore of that felony, which is punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
Postnatal drug tests, even when they are erroneous, can trigger grueling investigations by state-appointed social workers, which can lead to separation of mothers from their newborn children and criminal charges. But Moore's case was unusual because, for reasons that were unclear, she was not arrested for her alleged prenatal crime until her daughter, Remi, was in preschool. It was also unusual because the prosecutor dropped the charge after reconsidering his strategy of trying to "help" mothers by threatening them with prison.
Moore used methamphetamine early in her pregnancy but stopped after a religious epiphany inspired her to keep the baby and turn her life around. She attracted scrutiny at the hospital where she gave birth because her urine tested positive for marijuana and opioids. She said she smoked marijuana near the end of her pregnancy to relieve nausea. She also took prescribed opioids for pain relief the night before Remi was born. But the urinalysis results led to a drug test of Remi's first bowel movement, which detected traces of amphetamines, consistent with Moore's account that she stopped using meth midway through her pregnancy.
