A North Charleston woman was arrested this week after her newborn tested positive for marijuana at birth, with the case tracing back eight months to a hospital’s notification to child welfare officials. North Charleston Police identified the woman as Nia Jaquel White, who now faces a felony charge tied to the positive test.
White was arrested on Wednesday and charged with unlawful conduct toward a child, according to Live 5 News. She was booked into the Al Cannon Detention Center following her arrest. An arrest record posted by charlestonsc.mugshots.zone lists her arrest as occurring in Charleston County on October 21, with bond on the charge set at $5,000.
A Department of Social Services agent said the case actually began in February, when the agency received a notification from a hospital about the newborn’s positive marijuana test, the station’s report notes. The months-long gap between that initial report and this week’s arrest is not explained in the available record. DSS said the child is currently living with a family member.
How South Carolina Treats Positive Newborn Drug Tests
Under South Carolina’s Children’s Code, it is unlawful to place a child at unreasonable risk of harm affecting the child’s life, physical or mental health, or safety, per the South Carolina Code of Laws — the statute underlying the charge against White. Separately, state law defines a child-protection proceeding as a family-court process focused on shielding children from abuse or neglect, connecting families to services, and planning for permanency when parents cannot adequately care for a child, according to the South Carolina Code of Laws.
White’s case is not an isolated one. In Marlboro County, Octavia Henegan was charged with the same offense, unlawful conduct toward a child, after her newborn tested positive for cocaine, according to WYFF4. That investigation similarly began after DSS contacted the Marlboro County Sheriff’s Office regarding medical documentation of the positive test, the station reported. And a joint investigation by The Marshall Project documented a separate South Carolina case in which police interrogated a mother who tested positive for both fentanyl from an epidural and marijuana.
A Pattern With Deep Roots in South Carolina
South Carolina has drawn national scrutiny for how aggressively it pursues these cases. The Post and Courier examined nearly 200 cases of women charged between 2006 and 2021 with unlawful neglect of a child or homicide by child abuse stemming from alleged perinatal drug use, and found the state had the nation’s second-highest arrest rate for alleged perinatal drug use, behind only Alabama, according to a Pregnancy Justice report cited in that investigation. The same reporting found the South Carolina Department of Social Services recorded nearly 1,600 reports of substance-affected newborns in 2022 alone.
The scrutiny extends beyond South Carolina’s borders. The Marshall Project’s analysis found at least 70,000 cases nationwide across 21 states in which parents were referred to law enforcement over allegations of substance use during pregnancy — and in 15 of those states, more than half of the roughly 22,000 referred cases were ultimately found not to involve child abuse or neglect at all. A separate report from legislativeanalysis.org listed South Carolina among 23 states and the District of Columbia that, as of September 2022, treat prenatal substance exposure or substance use during pregnancy as child abuse or neglect or as grounds for a mandatory child-welfare report.
Marijuana-specific cases have drawn particular attention from advocates. Truthout reported that Greenville mother Lauren Smith lost custody of her newborn in February 2019 after the baby’s meconium tested positive for THC, and noted that a 2019 Kaiser Permanente study found more than 7 percent of pregnant people surveyed reported using marijuana.
No additional details about White’s arrest, including the circumstances of the hospital’s test or the status of the criminal case against her, were available as of publication.
