New York City’s Human Rights Commission released new advisories this week that make it clear it’s illegal to refuse to serve a pregnant woman in a bar or any other establishment that serves alcohol. While bars have to display signs emphasizing that drinking alcohol while pregnant could harm a fetus, according to city law it is up to the woman to make the choice whether or not to drink herself. While the overall guidelines released by the city mostly deal with workplace discrimination against pregnant women, they also do make it clear that restaurant owners, bartenders, bouncers, and other employees cannot refuse service to a pregnant woman in a bar.

According to the guidelines:

Judgments and stereotypes about how pregnant individuals should behave, their physical capabilities and what is or is not healthy for a fetus are pervasive in our society and cannot be used as pretext for unlawful discriminatory decisions in public venues.

The Human Rights Commission is looking into a case in which a pregnant woman claims she was discriminated against and not allowed to enter a bar or club–although the specific details of the case are unclear given that it’s still open for investigation.

This announcement also come after some controversy a few years ago about a prank pop up bar that advertised itself as catering to pregnant women. According to the Independent:

They even erected signage above the space in the East Village of Manhattan announcing the venue as Gestations.  While it attracted widespread local press coverage, the spot never actually opened.

The faux bar was brazen in its promotional language, declaring:  ‘All you mothers-to-be should come check out our trimester specials and our 9-month happy hour because now you’re drinking for two!”’ A similar tone was adopted on its Facebook page. ‘The bigger the belly, the more you can drink. True for men and pregnant women #gestationsny,’ it declared.

While the fact that laws to protect pregnant women include allowing them into bars seems somewhat counterintuitive, the overall guidelines are good news in the fight against discrimination.

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post NYC Bars Not Allowed to Turn Away Pregnant Women appeared first on Law Street.

The miracle of childbirth morphs into a financial nightmare for mothers without insurance or without maternity coverage in their insurance. While we all know having a baby involves much more than a visit from the stork, you might be shocked by the convoluted web of hidden costs and insurance infrastructure behind pregnancy and early motherhood in the United States. The system favors planned pregnancy and hits unintended mothers hard with unexpected costs and complications.

A woman planning for pregnancy will surely have done her insurance research, selecting a plan to cover the services she wants for pregnancy, delivery, and the baby’s first months. Her monthly insurance premiums will probably run a few hundred more dollars per month, but she’ll be pretty well taken care of. But what happens to those who find themselves pregnant without insurance or locked into plans without maternity coverage? Let’s find out. (Hint: it’s expensive.) And since the CDC estimates about half of all pregnancies in the United States occur unplanned, many women could be burdened with heavy financial woes.

Babies: You Pay for Way More Than Onesies, Diapers, and Toys

How much does having a baby cost? WebMD gives an estimate of up to $15,000 for hospital costs alone. A report from Young Invincibles provides the whopping range of $10,000-$20,000 for delivery, not counting potentially expensive complications during pregnancy and childbirth. Finally, a Truven Health Analytics study put the bill for uninsured vaginal births at a crippling $30,000, and uninsured c-section births broke the bank at $50,000 and up. Estimates fluctuate so much because every little service involved in an American pregnancy gets nailed with a different price hinging on a number of factors. This means that every woman can wind up with a different bill depending on the care she needs, the care her baby needs, her insurance or lack thereof, the hospital she chooses, and even where she lives. This makes planning ahead challenging for both insured and uninsured women.

Even talking directly to service providers might not help matters much. In a New York Times article, Elisabeth Rosenthal recounts the struggle of one uninsured expectant mother trying to get answers:

When she became pregnant, Ms. Martin called her local hospital inquiring about the price of maternity care; the finance office at first said it did not know, and then gave her a range of $4,000 to $45,000. ‘It was unreal,’ Ms. Martin said. ‘I was like, How could you not know this? You’re a hospital.’

Pregnant women might not be able to get exact numbers, but they can expect their baby bills to be pricey.

To put it all into perspective, when Kate Middleton gave birth to Prince George, the bill was only $15,000 and Kate enjoyed a private suite, chefs, and other amenities uncommon in American maternity wards. Where Americans itemize every cost, other countries put a lump-sum premium on births.

Additionally, mothers face many other costs to “having a baby” other than just giving birth. There’s a whole slew of services involved in prenatal care like ultrasounds and other diagnostics tests moms and babies need to stay healthy. If you have maternity coverage through your insurance, many or all of these services will probably be covered. But if you’re uncovered, you could spend up to $2,000 on prenatal care alone. And the payments don’t stop after you’ve given birth. Both new baby and mom could require specialized postnatal care. If you need that, you might have to bump your tab up by a couple grand more.

The Complications of Coverage

Most individual health plans (outside of employer-sponsored healthcare) don’t include maternity coverage. Many women could easily have insurance that lacks maternity care without realizing it. They could also have maternity coverage they haven’t studied closely in the absence of baby plans, leading to many unexpected costs. Investigating maternity insurance is a formidable task, as you have to look at every detail on what the coverage will pay for before, during, and after the actual birth. Even if you do serious calculations for what percentage of the different services will be covered, you could still be surprised by the final bill as costs of medical care can change with the market.

Can you get coverage if you become unexpectedly pregnant?

The short answer? Kind of.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) made it possible for women to sign up for pregnancy coverage in special enrollment periods. While that’s wonderful,  the coverage doesn’t go into effect until the day the baby is born which doesn’t help the mother at all for care she needs during pregnancy. I did an experiment through Healthcare.gov to see if I qualified for special enrollment under the Affordable Care Act. Sure enough, the questionnaire language read as “had a baby” and not “got pregnant.” At the end of the process, the vague answer I got from the marketplace was hardly what I would want if I were actually a pregnant woman hoping to get coverage:

It looks like you may qualify for a Special Enrollment Period. This means that you can probably enroll in a 2015 health plan through the Marketplace even though the annual Open Enrollment period is over.

The ACA helps when the baby arrives, but not so much with expensive prenatal care and the cost of actually having the baby. Women able to get coverage through special enrollment could still rack up a lot of debt if you don’t have thousands of dollars waiting comfortably in an emergency fund. On the up side, the baby will be covered when it’s born. The ACA does offer an enormous help to women with incomes below a certain amount. Women who qualify can apply to receive coverage through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) at any time during their pregnancy. The women who suffer the most in our system are those who make enough on paper, but lack insurance prior to getting pregnant.

Should you be able to get coverage if you become unexpectedly pregnant?

Different stakeholders’ answers to this question shed some light on why the decision involves too many factors to merit a “yes” or “no” answer. To make the discussion simple, let’s see what two major sides of the argument say.

Advocacy Groups

Advocacy groups including Young Invincibles, Planned Parenthood, and March of Dimes believe women should be able to get coverage for being pregnant (not just having a baby) whenever they want. They affirm since nearly half of all pregnancies are unplanned, we need more flexibility in maternity coverage to keep women and newborns in the United States healthy. In addition to the potential for complications in the delivery room, access to prenatal care could help women with heart conditions, diabetes, or who are at risk of preeclampsia (dangerous high blood pressure during pregnancy) get the preventive care they need to stay healthy and also deliver healthy babies.

If a woman doesn’t have coverage, she might forgo the key preventive, yet expensive, medical services she needs to stay healthy. Advocacy groups find the situation unacceptable and look toward the government for change.

Insurance Companies

Insurance companies say if women can get maternity coverage at any time, more people will wait to get coverage. Insurance company costs would spike and eventually trickle down for others enrolled in their plans to absorb. They also argue more flexible maternity coverage would make predicting costs more difficult as the system could become even less predictable.

To this concern, the nonprofit Young Invincibles released a report saying since the Affordable Care Act’s enactment, more women get insurance and fewer leave out maternity coverage, mitigating these risks for insurance companies in offering more open forms of pregnancy coverage.

So, Plan Ahead…If You Can

According to Healthy People 2020 data, about 30 percent of pregnant women do not receive early or adequate prenatal care. While many factors could claim responsibility for this statistic, surely a lack of insurance or lack of ability to get insurance plays a part. Skipping out on prenatal care puts the mother at risk, triples her risk of having an underweight baby, and increases the baby’s risk of death.

So to summarize…what happens if you’re pregnant without insurance?

• You will probably pay a lot of money to have your baby;
• The ACA will help you change coverage once your baby is born; and,
• Calculating your spending will be a headache.

Our system favors planned pregnancy. If you’re a woman of childbearing age, you can start saving for a rainy (or pregnant) day, pay a few hundred dollars more a month for just-in-case coverage, or join the voices of advocates hoping to achieve more flexibility for one of life’s most beautiful accidents.

Resources

Primary

CDC: Unintended Pregnancy Prevention

Healthcare.gov: Health Coverage if You’re Pregnant or Plan to Get Pregnant

Healthcare.gov: Healthcare Insurance Marketplace

Healthy People 2020: Maternal, Infant, and Child Health

Additional

Kaiser Health News: Pregnant and Uninsured? Don’t Count on Obamacare

Childbirth Connection: Better Maternity Care Could Save $5 Billion Annually

Young Invincibles: Without Maternity Coverage

Parents.com: Hospital Birth Costs

WebMD: What it Costs to Have a Baby

U.S. News & World Report: Health Insurance Premiums to Fluctuate Under Obamacare

Childbirth Connection: The Cost of Having a Baby in the United States

Ashley Bell

Ashley Bell communicates about health and wellness every day as a non-profit Program Manager. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Business and Economics from the College of William and Mary, and loves to investigate what changes in healthy policy and research might mean for the future. Contact Ashley at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Pregnant Without Insurance? Prepare for a Big Bill appeared first on Law Street.

Hey y’all!

Last July a young woman named  Lacey Weld from Tennessee was sentenced to 12 years in prison plus five years of supervised release after being captured on video spending 40 minutes inside of a methamphetamine manufacturing plant by an undercover police officer back in July. Did I mention she was in the last few weeks of her pregnancy at the time? Federal Judge Thomas Varlan determined that “enhanced sentencing” guidelines regarding harm to a child justified six years of the total sentence.

I’ll admit, I had never heard of the enhanced sentencing guidelines so to hear this story was pretty shocking and honestly I have mixed feelings about the whole situation.

A gaggle of reproductive-rights-organizations have taken it upon themselves to call on one-foot-out-the-door Attorney General Eric Holder to come out and publicly condemn Weld’s sentence. I’m curious as to why any of these organizations would want him to do such a thing? His reputation isn’t the best and no matter what he does or says it will not change the facts or the sentencing. In an interview with Vice, Weld’s attorney John Eldridge said that “laws intended to prevent ‘substantial risk of harm to life of a minor or an incompetent’ do not mention harm against a fetus.”

This is where things get sticky. Shouldn’t women be held responsible for their actions even if they are pregnant and especially if they are knowingly doing harm to themselves and their unborn child? Yes, you can argue that abortion would fall under that umbrella point of view, but if a woman has made the conscious decision to give birth to her child and either put it up for adoption or raise it herself, she should be held responsible for her actions.

This case has some serious grey areas and Weld’s lawyers are doing a damn good job of finding ways to interpret the laws in order to benefit her. That’s what lawyers are paid to do. But Weld needs to take a good, hard look in the mirror before she gets out and takes on the responsibility of raising that child. It may be a while but at some point it will be her responsibility again.

Some jurisdictions allow pregnant inmates to raise babies they give birth to in jail for several years before giving them to family members on the outside. This is best exemplified by the Argentinian movie Leonera (Lion’s Den) in which a woman who is convicted of murder finds out she is pregnant and is placed in a special ward of the prison where she is able to give birth and raise her baby for several years before giving him to a family member. It is an interesting concept and it almost seems like a good idea until I realize that our tax dollars would be supporting not only an inmate but also her child. The film in particular explores the pain and struggle of raising a child behind the walls of a prison and the importance of the bond between mother and child.

Lynn Paltrow, executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, says that  “this case tells women who are pregnant and cannot overcome their addiction is, really, to get an abortion.” I do not believe that is what this case is telling any woman. The point of punishing a person for her crime is to deter her from doing it again and to make an example out of her. Perhaps there is a girl out there who has a drug problem and just found out she is pregnant. By reading this article and she might realize that if she gets caught doing something illegal and harming her unborn child that she has chosen to keep she might be better off focusing on getting clean and taking care of herself and the baby.

Weld missed that opportunity. Not only did she take that away from herself and her child but she has also done irreparable damage. Even breathing in the fumes through a shirt at a meth lab can do damage to a fetus. According to the Department of Justice there is video footage of Lacey not only working in the meth lab but also smoking the drug. Weld told the court back in July that she wanted to “apologize for all the harm and wrongdoing (she has) done to (her) children. He could have died, and (she) just pray(s) and thank(s) God that (her) sister has him and he’s OK.”  Why is Weld just now realizing that she did something wrong and why is she merely apologizing? Shouldn’t she have been more aware of what she was doing before she got caught?

The baby did test positive for opioids and methamphetamine. I think Lacey got the time she deserved and I don’t think that it was wrong for the judge in the case to “enhance” her sentencing because she actually, knowingly did harm to her baby. If you are willing to do the crime, you should be willing to do the time.

I wish Weld all of the luck in the world and hope that she can kick her habit, but I also hope that her little baby has a fighting chance.

—

Allison Dawson (@AllyD528) Born in Germany, raised in Mississippi and Texas. Graduate of Texas Tech University and Arizona State University. Currently dedicating her life to studying for the LSAT. Twitter junkie. Conservative.

Featured image courtesy of [Daniel Lobo via Flickr]

Allison Dawson

Allison Dawson was born in Germany and raised in Mississippi and Texas. A graduate of Texas Tech University and Arizona State University, she’s currently dedicating her life to studying for the LSAT. Twitter junkie. Conservative. Get in touch with Allison at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Woman Gets Six Extra Years in Jail Due to Pregnancy appeared first on Law Street.