A civil rights organization is suing to halt the forced pregnancy testing of women when they are booked into the Alameda County jail.
This amounts to an invasion of the women’s privacy, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in the lawsuit filed in June against Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern.
Plaintiffs are three women, including a 69-year-old political activist, who were forced to submit to the testing. The suit says the forced testing violates privacy rights under both federal and state constitutions, and violates state law allowing inmates to refuse non-emergency medical care.
“The sheriff’s policy publicly intrudes into one of the most intimate and private areas of a person’s life – reproductive decision-making,” the suit states.
This case comes on the heels of the revelation that some women were sterilized by state prison doctors against their will and consent.
Plaintiff Nancy Macias said she was forced to take a pregnancy test after her arrest during an August 2012 political protest.
“Being forced to submit to a pregnancy test against my will was not about my health,” Macias told the San Francisco Chronicle. “It was invasive, offensive and humiliating.”
The suit filed in Superior Court included a 2010 letter from Ahern to the ACLU, stating that women who are brought to the Glenn Dyer Jail are tested so they can be provided with the necessary medical treatment. When a woman tests positive, she is transferred to the Santa Rita County Jail where there is an obstetrics clinic, the letter said.
Susan Harman, a political activist, was 69 years old when she was forced to take a pregnancy test in 2010 after being arrested during a protest of the Oscar Grant shooting. Harman says the testing was not done out of concern for her health.
“Nobody gave us any explanation,” she told the Chronicle. Harman, who is diabetic, says officers ignored her requests for her daily insulin shot, but were insistent that she take a pregnancy test. Both Harman and Macias were released the following day, without the results of their tests.
The ACLU says that the proper way to conduct the testing is to offer it on a voluntary basis as part of the routine health care screening.
A spokesman for Ahern, Sgt. J.D. Nelson, said the forced testing was part of the settlement from a 10-year-old lawsuit against the sheriff’s office for not providing pregnancy testing.
“If you tell us that we have to test people and then tell us that we can’t test people, what can we do?” Nelson said. He did not provide details of the settled lawsuit or who filed it.
The lawsuit does not seek monetary damages, but instead requests the court to order the sheriff’s office to end the practice.
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