THE WAR ON WOMBS
Casey Shehi’s son James was born in August 2014, remarkably robust even though he was four weeks premature. But as the maternity nurse took the baby from his exhausted mother’s arms, Shehi felt a prick of dread. “She said they were going to have to take him back to the nursery to produce some urine, because I had a positive drug screen for benzodiazepines,” recalls Shehi, a 37-year-old nursing-home employee from Gadsden, a small Alabama city about 60 miles northeast of Birmingham. “I said, ‘That can’t be true. Can you please check it again? Run the screen again.’”
The nurse asked if she had a prescription for any form of benzo—Xanax or Klonopin or Ativan? No, Shehi insisted, there must be a mistake. Then she remembered: the Valium. One night
