On Friday, 33-year-old Samantha Randazzo, who was nine months pregnant, was awaiting her arraignment in a New York City courtroom on a drug possession charge when her water broke. She gave birth to a baby boy in open court.
Public defenders and legal advocates from Brooklyn Defender Services and the Legal Aid Society say Randazzo was at times shackled while in labor. (The New York Police Department and court personnel deny this claim.)
The NYPD says it did not know Randazzo was pregnant at the time of her arrest, as she was wearing “baggy clothes.”
The NYPD says it did not know Randazzo was pregnant at the time of her arrest, as she was “wearing baggy clothes.” Their formal statement suggests that Randazzo later informed officers she was “experiencing withdrawal from drugs,” only divulging that she was pregnant at the police station. Officers then brought Randazzo to Coney Island Hospital, where she was admitted, though the details of her treatment are unknown. NYC Health and Hospitals, which operates Coney Island Hospital, has not commented on the case. After Randazzo was discharged, she was transported by officers to court to be arraigned, where her labor either began or intensified.
The NYPD’s “baggy clothes” defense should be easily unraveled by basic police procedure. Safety frisks and searches incident to arrest are so routine that a full-term pregnant belly, even under looser clothing, would seem to be impossible not to discover. These searches are typically conducted contemporaneously with or immediately after an arrest. Randazzo’s body was likely investigated and handled multiple times during the hours between her arrest and when she was transported to the hospital at 3:30 a.m. Saturday.
Now, whether Randazzo was actually in withdrawal, already in labor or some combination of the two by the time she went to the hospital — the conditions can have overlapping symptoms — we will never know. What we do know is that her discharge raises serious questions about implicit and explicit bias toward potentially drug-dependent pregnant people in the healthcare and carceral systems.
Randazzo’s pain and discomfort as a result of her pregnancy was treated by every person she encountered that day as an accessory to possible drug use. (Notably, only the NYPD has commented on the alleged withdrawal.) The police say they knew that Randazzo was heavily pregnant by the time they brought her to court in cuffs. In a post-Covid era, arraignments are conducted from hospital beds by video with some frequency, especially with compelling circumstances. The NYPD could also have issued a desk appearance ticket, a quasi-discretionary written order to appear in court that does not require being taken into custody, upon this discovery.
But the system did not see a mother suffering — it saw a criminal. Randazzo’s distress was visible only as the predictable consequence of addiction, in itself a disease too often dismissed as a choice. So the hospital sent her on her way. The officers took her back to jail. The court called her case. And when Randazzo did go into labor in front of a room full of suits, robes and badge numbers, she deserved the proper medical care and human dignity that every birthing person is entitled to, regardless of their drug use.
The culture of dehumanization present in Randazzo’s case is far from an aberration. As a public defender, I witnessed firsthand how the state lays claim to the bodies of women, rendering them invisible, incriminating — and sometimes both. In some states such as Tennessee, sex workers (disproportionately women, both cis and trans) face an aggravated prostitution felony if they are HIV positive. In women’s prisons and immigration detention facilities across the country, female inmates are forced to strip naked and remove their tampons so that guards (often male) can search for “contraband.” And then, of course, there are the myriad states fighting to deprive pregnant women of vital abortion and miscarriage care, casting criminal charges across state lines at providers who mail patients mifepristone (an abortion pill).
In women’s prisons and immigration detention facilities across the country, female inmates are forced to strip naked and remove their tampons so that guards (often male) can search for “contraband.”
Randazzo’s case also surfaces a version of pregnancy degradation and policing that hides behind child welfare concerns and platitudes like “it’s for her own good.” The heightened criminalization of women who are pregnant and substance dependent is one of the most significant post-Roe phenomena, with a 2026 study from the Marshall Project revealing more than 70,000 cases in 21 states where parents were referred to law enforcement agencies on allegations of drug use during pregnancy, often by the hospitals where they received care.
Fetal personhood laws, originally enacted to protect pregnant women from abusive partners, are now political weapons aimed and fired back at the very women they were meant to shield. An Alabama Iraq War veteran was charged with endangerment after a hospital stool sample revealed traces of methamphetamine. An Oklahoma woman who checked herself into rehab upon learning she was pregnant was tricked by police into a blood draw that incriminated her past. Chelsea Becker spent more than a year in a California jail on murder charges for allegedly causing a stillbirth through methamphetamine use before the charges were dismissed — while Adora Perez, convicted on a charge that doesn’t actually exist in California law for a nearly identical circumstance, remains behind bars. The searing irony: These laws don’t just punish women, they worsen health outcomes for mothers and babies alike, driving fearful pregnant women away from the hospitals and treatment programs that could save them both.
Randazzo’s case is not technically one of fetal criminalization. She was not charged in relation to her pregnancy. But like so many of these other women, her body became state property at the moment it was most vulnerable. Her charge was treated as character evidence. And her baby was born into the system, surveilled before he drew his first breath.
Randazzo’s attorney expects her case to be dismissed. But even if it is, that does little to relieve the trauma and fear of bringing a life into a world while your own is being treated as disposable.
Madeleine Lippey
Madeleine Lippey is a former public defender, trial attorney and writer based in New York City. She is a graduate of Stanford and Georgetown Law and an advocate for reproductive, economic, racial and criminal justice. Opinions set forth in her articles are made in her individual capacity, not as an employee of any public defender office or agency.