Policing pregnancy: Wisconsin’s ‘fetal protection’ law, one of the nation’s most punitive, forces women into treatment or jail

Editor’s note: This story contains language and descriptions surrounding suicide and sexual assault.

Tamara Loertscher arrived at the Mayo Clinic Health System in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on Aug. 1, 2014 despondent. The 29-year-old had suffered depression all her life, but in recent months, her mental health grew especially desperate. She struggled to eat and get out of bed, thinking of harming herself.

Severe hypothyroidism fueled her anguish. Untreated, it causes debilitating depression and fatigue. Loertscher had required daily medication since radiation treatment killed her thyroid. But she was unemployed and uninsured, and, facing a yearlong wait for BadgerCare, unable to afford the drugs.

When one home test, and then another, indicated Loertscher was pregnant, she went to Taylor County Department of Human Services, saying she needed treatment she could not afford for depression and hypothyroidism. Workers directed Loertscher to the hospital’s emergency room where she voluntarily admitted herself to the behavioral health unit.

Under “reason for admission,” the medical records quoted Loertscher: “‘I really needed help.'”

An ultrasound showed a 14-week-old, healthy looking fetus. When Loertscher heard the news, she cried with relief.

After several days of reading and resting on the psychiatric ward, with newly prescribed thyroid medication, antidepressants, prenatal vitamins and supplements coursing through her system, Loertscher felt ready to leave.

But while she had checked herself in, she could not check herself out. The county had put a “hold” on her.

The Taylor County Department of Human Services had issued a request for temporary physical custody under Wisconsin Act 292, dubbed the Unborn Child Protection Act.

Drug tests upon Loertscher’s arrival had shown “unconfirmed” positives for THC, methamphetamines and amphetamines. Later, the state would contend she knowingly used drugs and alcohol while pregnant; Loertscher would insist she stopped as soon as she learned of the pregnancy.

Today, 44 states and the District of Columbia have laws aiming to protect fetal development from drugs or alcohol.

Wisconsin is one of just five states that allow civil detention for pregnant people accused of substance use. Its legal proceedings take place out of public view, under seal, with a low standard of evidence and often a court-appointed attorney for the fetus — but none for the person gestating it. The law can require forced addiction treatment for the duration of pregnancy.

“The law is a means of allowing the (local health) department to begin working with pregnant individuals to help overcome challenges associated with various (alcohol or drug) concerns, limit the potential effects of continued use on the unborn child and receive necessary treatment and services to assist the individual towards recovery,” says Kay Kiesling, Outagamie County’s Children, Youth and Families manager. “This early intervention allows for a potentially safer environment for when the child is born.”

But every leading medical association that considered these laws has condemned a punitive approach, saying it harms more than it helps. Pregnancy Justice, a legal advocacy group, says Wisconsin’s fetal protection law is the most “egregious” of the civil statutes in the country.

With abortion now largely inaccessible in Wisconsin, Act 292 could become more widely applied, worries Loertscher’s attorney Freya Bowen. The law applies to any “controlled substance,” even over the counter medications such as Sudafed, she says, and many people could fall under its purview.

Bowen fears that “really ugly enforcement” could prevent a pregnant person from leaving the state to obtain an abortion.

Once the court has exercised this jurisdiction, she says, “they’re free to do all kinds of stuff that are ‘in the best interests of the unborn child.'”

Case starts with visit to doctor

Loertscher’s legal entanglement began when social workers at the hospital and county worried that the drug use risked her fetus’ health and requested she attend residential treatment for substance use disorder. She refused because, she says, she didn’t have a dependency and had self-medicated in absence of affordable prescriptions. That afternoon, the county issued its hold.

“They said they were doing it for my baby,” Loertscher recalls, crying, in an interview with Wisconsin Watch. “But they were hurting him, too.”

Within weeks of the complaint, Loertscher would end up in jail.

Her case was one of 387 that year in which county child protective services “screened in” allegations of “unborn child abuse” across Wisconsin for further investigation, and one of 67 with “substantiated” claims that a pregnant woman had harmed her fetus by using drugs or alcohol.

Human embryos and fetuses — which the law terms “unborn children” — came under the auspices of Wisconsin’s Department of Children and Families in 1998. Amid the national “crack-baby” hysteria, politicians and press euphemistically called Wisconsin’s Act 292 the “cocaine mom” or “crack mama” law.

Legal scholars say such laws undermine pregnant people’s bodily autonomy — particularly for those who are poor or women of color who are more likely to be involved with the child welfare or criminal justice systems.

One woman, Alicia Beltran of Jackson, Wisconsin, even ended up in shackles in 2013 due to past drug use, despite testing negative for all substances except Suboxone, which she used to wean herself off Percocet, during her pregnancy.

Says Michele Bratcher Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California Irvine: “In terms of civil liberties, I mean, there’s nothing more extreme.”

About 400 cases a year

Since 2007, Wisconsin authorities have screened in an average of 382 complaints annually, meaning that about one pregnant person per day is investigated for unborn child abuse. But with limited publicly available data from the Department of Children and Families — and court records shielded from public view — it is unknown how many women, like Loertscher, have ended up incarcerated due to noncompliance. It is also unknown how many mothers have lost custody of their infants after birth because of the law.

Yet separation happens far too often, suggests one self-described “jaded” state public defender who only agreed to speak anonymously for fear of repercussions on her clients. She says Act 292 enables “the systemic kidnapping of children from women — and families, sometimes — who have struggled with addiction.”

A recent investigation by The Marshall Project, The Frontier and AL.com, co-edited and published in partnership with The Washington Post, found that since 1999, more than 50 women have been charged with child neglect or manslaughter after testing positive for drug use following stillbirth or miscarriage.

Since its enactment, Wisconsin’s fetal protection law has weathered two high-profile challenges. Loertscher’s legal team — which included now-Attorney General Josh Kaul — was most successful, securing a federal court ruling that deemed the law unconstitutional. But the win was brief, and due to a technicality, the law remains in effect today.

Loertscher’s case gives the public a glimpse at what can happen at its most extreme. While the law does not require county health officials and hospital workers to report such cases, a 2018 Pew study found Wisconsin practitioners “commonly” misinterpret their legal obligations — something researchers suggest the state should clarify.

War on drugs leads to ‘crack baby’ myth

In 1997, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that a Waukesha juvenile court lacked authority to detain a pregnant woman at a hospital until childbirth on the basis of drug use. Not long after, a bipartisan group of lawmakers gave it that very authority in Act 292, which gave “unborn children” from zygotes to embryos full human rights — the only state to do so.

Bonnie Ladwig, a Republican representative from Racine who introduced the bill, testified: “Cocaine babies and children with fetal alcohol syndrome can be seen as abused children.”

Health professionals warned the fear of punishment would discourage pregnant women from seeking prenatal care and substance use treatment. Some suggested the law would incentivize women to get abortions to avoid detention.

And analysts — and even one of the co-sponsors — doubted its constitutionality. The nonpartisan Wisconsin Legislative Council and Legislative Reference Bureau advised that the liberty and privacy rights enshrined in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey would likely outweigh the state’s interest in “unborn human life before fetal viability,” according to the Collaborative for Reproductive Equity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Writing in her book “Policing the Womb,” Goodwin, the law professor, says the media used anecdotal reports to fuel hysteria over so-called “crack babies” — an ostensible “bio-underclass” doomed to lifelong suffering.

The racist crack baby myth cast Black, brown and Indigenous women as bad mothers and their infants as permanently damaged, Goodwin tells Wisconsin Watch. She notes that the former director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect claimed — without evidence — that up to 15 percent of African American children would have “permanent brain damage” from gestational cocaine exposure, even though the majority of crack cocaine users are white.

“If this law had the face of middle or upper income white women at the time, it would not have been a law that would have won enactment or support,” Goodwin says.

A longitudinal study has since debunked the myth. Dr. Hallam Hurt, a neonatologist and pediatrics professor at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, followed children exposed to cocaine in utero for nearly a quarter of a century.

Hurt found no meaningful differences in development or cognition between the groups with gestational cocaine exposure and without. But both groups — all children from low-income families — performed poorly, leading Hurt and her team to conclude that poverty more powerfully influenced a child’s well-being. 

A Wisconsin Watch analysis of DCF data found that today, Wisconsin child protective services disproportionately investigates allegations of unborn child abuse against Indigenous women, compared to their population size. The public defender says she represents a “very high” number of Native American women in Act 292 cases.

‘He is what gave me purpose’

Depression dogged Loertscher since elementary school, but antidepressants exacerbated her suicidal thoughts. She tried to die by overdose several times. A low point came when Loertscher passed out at a bar after drinking. A videotape surfaced showing her unconscious, being raped by multiple men.

That’s when Loertscher began self-medicating with methamphetamine. The stimulant “helped her to get out of bed in the morning,” according to a complaint later filed in federal court. Marijuana also mellowed her symptoms, which her attorneys contend she smoked “fewer than 10 times” that year.

Loertscher’s pregnancy by her then-boyfriend, now husband, compelled her to save her life — and her son’s.

“As soon as I found out that he was going to be a part of us, everything was for him,” Loerstcher says. “He is what gave me purpose.”

She says she disclosed her drug use in hopes of ensuring her son’s health and tried to explain her inability to afford prescription treatment to hospital staff.

“I was trying to self-medicate,” Loertscher says. “They didn’t care. It’s like, they had a certain set of protocols that they had to follow, and it’s like, erase the woman out of the equation.”

‘I don’t matter at all’

Less than 24 hours after Taylor County requested temporary physical custody, a social worker ushered Loertscher into a hospital conference room, where she listened into a court hearing on speakerphone.

On the other line were the court commissioner, corporation counsel, human services staff and another lawyer — court-appointed to represent Loertscher’s fetus. She lacked an attorney.

“It just kind of confirmed the feelings of ‘I don’t matter at all,'” Loertscher recalls.

Pregnant people going through Act 292 proceedings are eligible for state public defenders if they qualify by income. But Sandra Storandt, a social worker with Jackson County, says pregnant women in her county typically lack representation in this initial hearing because it happens so quickly — by law, within 48 hours of filing a request for temporary physical custody.

The authorities wanted Loertscher to remain at the hospital until “medically cleared” and then transferred to a licensed treatment facility. A center in Eau Claire, over an hour from her home in Medford, had availability. In Wisconsin, pregnant women get priority placement in substance use treatment centers.

A court transcript documents the hearing. Asked if she understood the hearing’s purpose, Loertscher said she would not answer questions without an attorney.

The court recessed in a failed attempt to find an attorney to represent her. Loertscher left the conference table and asked to make a call.

“I just followed Tammy down the hallway to her (hospital) room,” the social worker told the court. “She doesn’t want to be part of this.”

The commissioner ruled that she had waived her right to participate, noting that they had limited time before they would have to release her.

At this point, authorities had another 24 hours.

A social worker went to Loertscher’s room, holding a phone so she could hear. The county called an obstetrician/gynecologist who claimed Loertscher admitted to knowingly using methamphetamine while pregnant. Prefacing that she was “not an expert witness,” the doctor explained some concerns around methamphetamine use during pregnancy, including low birth weight and possible learning disabilities and inattention to prenatal care.

In 2022, Pregnancy Justice reviewed numerous studies and reports about gestational exposure to various drugs, concluding, “Research tells us that there is no scientific evidence of unique, certain, or irreparable harm for fetuses exposed to cocaine, methamphetamine, opioids, or cannabis in utero.”

The doctor recommended residential treatment; the fetus’ attorney asked the court to force Loertscher into treatment “for this child to have a chance of literally being born.”

Afsha Malik, formerly a research and program associate at Pregnancy Justice, says Wisconsin’s “probable cause” standard means courts need only the “suspicion” of drug use to order commitment. The four other states which permit civil commitment — the Dakotas, Oklahoma and Minnesota — all require “clear and convincing evidence.”

The commissioner found enough evidence to detain Loertscher at the Eau Claire hospital until discharging her to the residential treatment facility. 

Separation threatened

After the hearing, Loertscher says the hospital staff warned her she would lose custody of her baby as soon as it was born.

Storandt, the Jackson County social worker, says that in her county, the likelihood of a child staying with a parent is higher than their chance of removal, and separation isn’t always permanent.

But the state public defender practicing in northwestern Wisconsin, who spoke anonymously, says she’s seen newborns taken from parents “many, many times.”

This public defender estimates she handles about one Act 292 case per year. Unlike Loertscher, many of the clients are moms with prior involvement with the child welfare system. Their chief concern: “Am I going to be able to keep my baby after they’re born?”

The attorney says she’s seen foster care requests issued the moment a mom tries to take her infant home from the hospital, “even when I’ve had them make it through treatment, and the babies are born clean, and there’s nothing in their system.”

The conditions required to keep one’s children, or get them back, might appear simple enough: keeping regular contact with a social worker, attending supervised visits, taking parenting classes. But even these may be “unrealistic” for families without reliable transportation, a stable address or a working phone, the public defender says.

“Our system is not built to genuinely help parents, who are indigent, who are drug addicted, who are mentally ill, to actually comply with some of the conditions that counties and states want them to comply with in order to get their kids back a lot of times,” the lawyer says.

Deciding to fight

Loertscher, for the most part, resisted the process.

“I just found out that I was pregnant, and they were threatening to take him away,” she says. “I felt like I had to fight for the both of us.”

Two days after the hearing, Loertscher was supposed to transfer to residential treatment. She refused a blood test required for admission, and instead convinced the hospital to let her go home. She left with prescriptions for her thyroid and depression and plans to see a local nurse practitioner.

The discharge summary noted Loertscher didn’t think she misused substances, and that she “would like to keep the baby and that she would be caring for her pregnancy.”

At the courthouse, Loertscher’s case escalated. Taylor County’s corporation counsel requested to take her into immediate custody, and a judge agreed.

Over the next week, police twice attempted to arrest Loertscher to ensure her presence at court hearings. Loertscher’s family also tried to hire an attorney, but they could not afford the retainer fees. 

So on Sept. 4, 2014, Loertscher appeared at her plea hearing without counsel. She disputed the county’s claims that she had committed unborn child abuse, setting the case for trial. If a jury determined her guilty with “reasonable certainty” by “clear, satisfactory and convincing” evidence, the court could detain her for the rest of her pregnancy.

That is, if she ever went to trial. But something else got in the way first. Finding she had violated an earlier court order to go into treatment by refusing the required blood test, the judge sentenced her to comply — or serve 30 days in the Taylor County Jail.

“I can’t have the deputies hog-tie you and take you to that treatment center,” the judge said. “That’s a decision you’ll have to make. But I can punish you if you decide not to obey that order.”

Hauled off to jail

Leaving the hearing, Loertscher reflected on her options: inpatient treatment or jail. Of the two, it was obvious which she’d prefer.

But accepting treatment also meant accepting a diagnosis with which she disagreed. It meant adopting an incorrect label — this time, “addict” — that someone else chose for her.

“They said they were going to put me in treatment and keep me there until I had my child, and then they were going to take him away,” she says. “So that’s where I’m like, ‘Well, I’m just going to have to go to jail then.'”

But jail brought its own risks, including missed prenatal appointments. The jail also refused to provide in-house care until she took a pregnancy test, which she initially refused. According to Loertscher’s eventual complaint, when a guard taunted her about taking a “piss test,” Loertscher lashed out.

She yelled obscenities through the closed door. The guard “grabbed” her by the arm, “tried to pull her out of the cell,” threatened her with a stun gun and then marched her into solitary confinement.

She spent about 36 hours in a “cold and filthy” windowless room with feces on the floor and walls. Her metal bed frame had only a “thin mattress and blanket” at night.

While in solitary, Loertscher says she received another threat. If she didn’t provide a urine sample, she’d remain locked up for the rest of her pregnancy and would have her baby there, which the National Perinatal Association warns is bad for the health of the child and parent.

Eventually, Loertscher found a number for the public defender’s office scrawled on a piece of paper by the phone. She called, and an attorney negotiated her release. She agreed to undergo an alcohol and other drug abuse assessment, comply with recommended treatment and pay for and submit to weekly drug tests, among other things.

After 18 days in jail, Loertscher went home. But she was far from free.

‘Born into chaos’

A week after she left jail, she received a letter from the Taylor County Department of Human Services, saying it had made a separate “administrative finding that she had committed child maltreatment” — a designation separate from her court case and consent decree.

“I had to protect us,” Loertscher recalls, “because what they were doing was so ridiculous.”

So she connected with Pregnancy Justice — then called the National Advocates for Pregnant Women — which teamed up with New York University School of Law and a Madison-area law firm. At the end of 2014, Loertscher filed a lawsuit in federal court, arguing she had been “deprived of liberty and numerous, well-established constitutional rights” after seeking health care.

A month later, during a weekly drug test, her water broke and Loertscher went into labor. At the hospital, she says staff questioned her about Act 292. A police officer stationed outside her room heard the same threat: if she did not cooperate, they would take her baby away.

Says Loertscher: “He was born into chaos.”

Her attorney raced from Madison to Eau Claire to intervene, but in the end, the hospital allowed Loertscher and her boyfriend to take Harmonious, their newborn, home.

“He is my everything,” Loertscher says. “I just want to make him proud.”

A court win — ‘then they took it away’

Over two years after Harmonious’ birth, the federal court ruled in Loertscher’s favor.

The court found that Act 292 implicated fundamental constitutional rights “to be free from physical restraint” and “coerced medical treatment,” and it was “unconstitutionally vague.”

Each element of unborn child abuse is wide open for interpretation, the judge noted. Its key terms “habitually,” “severe,” even “risk,” are all matters of “degree” that neither the statute nor departmental standards define. As a result, the law could be enforced against any pregnant person with a history of substance use disorder, he said, “regardless of whether she actually used controlled substances while pregnant.”

The state was immediately barred from enforcing Act 292 across Wisconsin.

“I felt like, at least it was for something,” she says. “And then they took that away.”

Within a week, Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel appealed the decision.

An appeals court panel ruled the injunction was “moot” because Loertscher had left Wisconsin two weeks after Harmonious’ birth, temporarily moving to Hawaii.

“I beat myself up so much,” Loertscher says through tears. “If I would have stayed in that shithole, it (the ruling) would have stuck.”

The law remains in effect today.

At least one substantive change to procedure has been made, although it came before Loertscher filed her lawsuit. The Department of Children and Families no longer allows social workers to determine whether or not a pregnant person has committed “maltreatment.” Instead, they only determine whether or not to require “services,” such as counseling or treatment.

“I don’t understand how they can acknowledge that something is unconstitutional, but keep it going,” Loertscher says. “That makes it seem like our constitution doesn’t mean anything to certain people, like, certain people’s rights don’t matter at certain points.”

Wisconsin’s confusing standard

Fetal protection laws place pregnant people into a distinct legal class, says Malik, who at the time she spoke to Wisconsin Watch was with Pregnancy Justice.

While most drug-related offenses relate to possession or distribution, these laws punish pregnant women for use — even if these are legal substances, such as alcohol, which are lawfully obtained.

The behavior identified as unborn child abuse in Wisconsin falls under standards that even those charged with enforcing the law struggle to describe. It requires that a pregnant person “habitually lacks self-control” regarding alcohol or drug use. The habitual lack of self-control must be “exhibited to a severe degree” and create a “substantial risk” that the fetus’ — and eventually, the newborn’s — physical health “will be seriously affected or endangered” unless the parent receives treatment.

When asked by email to clarify what “habitually,” “severe degree” or “serious harm” means, Department of Children and Families communications director Gina Paige said the law “did not include any further language or define these terms.”

Enforcement varies by county. Only Dane, Jackson and Outagamie gave Wisconsin Watch insight into their procedures. Another county provided background information on its approach on the condition of anonymity. A social worker from Jackson provided an on-the-record interview, the others provided answers or statements via email. Officials from Brown and Ashland counties initially expressed interest in speaking but did not follow through with interviews or email responses.

Dane County says it “does not endorse” placing people in a “locked facility to force treatment” and instead favors harm reduction, which it did not define.

‘Being quiet about it isn’t helping anyone’

Seven years after the birth of her healthy baby boy, Loertscher, who now lives in Georgia, is still scarred by her entanglement with Act 292.

“They say that they’re doing it to protect the child, but in reality, at least in my situation, they didn’t care one bit,” she says. “It was all about, for some reason, proving that I was a bad person.”

The detention, incarceration and legal battle has left her with further anxiety and depression. Loertscher has found it difficult to trust anyone outside of her immediate family, leaving her unable to work and even afraid to drive.

The trauma she and her husband share manifests in overprotective parenting.

But in the last two years, around the time Harmonious began school, Loertscher felt something shift within her: “I finally was like, ‘You know what? I’m not going to let them take all my power away.'”

She started taking better care of herself, socializing more and giving interviews about her experience, because “being quiet about it isn’t helping anyone.”

“What they did didn’t break us, if that was what they were trying to do,” she says. “And our son turned out amazing. He’s smart and he’s happy.”

The 7-year-old is “like a little fish” in the water and loves to read with his mom, and tell her jokes he picked up from books.

His favorite, of late, asks: “What did the alien say to the vegetable garden? Take me to your weeder!”

Loertscher has a message for anyone else caught up in Wisconsin’s fetal protection law.

“I want to tell them that they can be brave,” she says. “They can come forward and they can say that what happened to them is wrong, because it was.”

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available 24/7. Call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or use the chat feature at 988lifeline.org.

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.