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Cleveland State University

Medicine and Health Sciences

Pregnancy

Publication Year

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Supporting Mothers With Mental Illness: Postpartum Mental Health Service Linkage As A Matter Of Public Health And Child Welfare Policy, Jesse Krohn, Msed, Jd, Meredith Matone, Drph, Mhs Jul 2017

Supporting Mothers With Mental Illness: Postpartum Mental Health Service Linkage As A Matter Of Public Health And Child Welfare Policy, Jesse Krohn, Msed, Jd, Meredith Matone, Drph, Mhs

Journal of Law and Health

Through our work in youth advocacy as, respectively, legal and public health professionals, we are all too aware of the high levels of health care fragmentation experienced during pregnancy and postpartum by poor, young mothers of color. Meredith Matone’s research highlights the heightened risk of fragmentation for girls with histories of child welfare involvement. For example, she found that 66.7% of young mothers who had resided in out-of-home placements and who had taken antipsychotic medication prior to becoming pregnant failed to fill prescriptions for antipsychotics in their first postpartum year. Put another way, two-thirds of these vulnerable young mothers—a far …


Shifting Our Focus From Retribution To Social Justice: An Alternative Vision For The Treatment Of Pregnant Women Who Harm Their Fetuses, April L. Cherry Jan 2015

Shifting Our Focus From Retribution To Social Justice: An Alternative Vision For The Treatment Of Pregnant Women Who Harm Their Fetuses, April L. Cherry

Journal of Law and Health

The ways in which society responds to pregnant women whose behavior purportedly harms their fetuses can be explored from a variety of legal vantage points. This article argues that the criminal law model currently used is ineffective. The assignment of criminal liability to pregnant women is often rooted in fetal personhood and maternal deviance discourse. Criminal law solutions fail because they fail to take into account the fact that maternal behavior is often the result of a myriad of the social and economic conditions over which pregnant women have little or no control. The criminal law model, therefore, simply punishes …