Alabama Needed Proof That Violence Caused a Miscarriage. Its Drug-Exposure Felony Requires No Injury.

Alabama charged a former police officer with murder after his pregnant wife alleged that he punched her in the stomach and choked her before a miscarriage. Four years later, the fetal-death charge was gone. ProPublica reported Sunday that Robert Maddox Jr. pleaded guilty in May to domestic violence and received five years of probation, about $3,000 in fines and anger-management classes.

The outcome did not establish that Maddox caused the miscarriage. A grand jury had reduced the original murder charge to manslaughter, alleging that he recklessly caused the fetal death. Houston County District Attorney Russ Goodman told ProPublica that no expert could connect the alleged assault to the miscarriage and that he could not prove manslaughter at trial. Maddox denied the account, said he was made out to be someone he was not and said his wife had no marks at the hospital.

That causation requirement is not a loophole. It is a basic limit on homicide power: a prosecutor seeking to punish someone for a death must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant caused it. Miscarriages can have multiple causes, and an allegation of violence cannot substitute for medical evidence. The public-interest problem is what Alabama requires when the accused person is pregnant.

Alabama's chemical-endangerment law makes it a Class C felony for a responsible person to knowingly, recklessly or intentionally expose a child to a controlled substance. Serious physical injury raises the offense to a Class B felony; death raises it to Class A. In 2013, the Alabama Supreme Court held in Ex parte Ankrom that the statute's word ‘child’ includes an unborn child. For the exposure offense, prosecutors need not prove injury at all.

That lower threshold is not theoretical. ProPublica identified more than 40 pregnant women arrested in Houston County since 2009 after positive drug tests. Almost all of the babies in the cases it reviewed survived. One woman ultimately spent nearly 10 months in prison after violating work-release terms; another spent four months in jail after failing to complete treatment and report to probation. A different defendant received a five-year sentence. Those later violations matter, but they occurred only after an exposure-based felony case put each woman under criminal supervision.

The latest national data show the scale of that machinery. Pregnancy Justice says prosecutors brought at least 902 pregnancy-related cases from June 2022 through June 2025, including 204 in Alabama. Across the national dataset, 854 of 955 charges did not require proof of harm, 717 cases involved live births and records showed medical-system involvement in 700 cases. The researchers call the figures preliminary and an undercount; the Alabama total should not be read as a final census.

Alabama therefore operates two proof systems under the banner of fetal protection. When the state alleged that a third party's violence caused a fetal death, it needed expert evidence connecting conduct to harm. When the state charges a pregnant person under chemical endangerment, knowing, reckless or intentional exposure can complete the felony without proof of injury, and a hospital test can supply the evidence. The law is formally different because the crimes are different. The accountability question is why the easier route is concentrated on the person carrying the pregnancy.

Supporters can reasonably argue that prenatal drug exposure creates risks before injury becomes visible and that the state should not wait for a harmed newborn. Goodman told ProPublica that his office has made efforts to help by recommending addiction treatment as part of sentences and that straight prison is rare absent prior history or other circumstances. Some of the reported incarceration followed probation or work-release violations. Those points complicate the punishment record; they do not erase the exposure felony or the unequal burden of proof that starts the process.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists takes the opposite policy view: substance-use disorder during pregnancy should be addressed through prevention and treatment, not punitive testing, reporting or prosecution. It says testing should occur only with consent and that a positive result should not drive a patient out of care or by itself determine family separation. That position does not deny fetal risk; it disputes whether criminal surveillance improves outcomes.

A state that says fetuses deserve equal protection should have to explain this asymmetry in public terms. Alabama lawmakers and prosecutors should publish how many pregnancy cases begin with medical testing, how many involve documented injury, how often treatment is available before arrest, and how outcomes compare with assaults on pregnant people. Without that accounting, fetal personhood functions less like one equal rule and more like a system that demands proof of causation for a fetal-death charge while punishing pregnant people for exposure without injury.