South Carolina is on the cutting edge of a controversial practice that will someday be decided by the Supreme Court — can women who take illegal drugs during her pregnancy be charged with child abuse?
South Carolina considers a fetus in the third trimester to be a person. As such, the law considers a woman who takes an illegal drug in the third trimester to be administering drugs to a child — a form of child abuse.
In May, South Carolina plans to place Regina McKnight on trial for the second time on charges that she smoked crack cocaine throughout the third trimester of her pregnancy which caused her unborn child to be stillborn. Among other crimes, McKnight has been charged with homicide.
McKnight’s first trial ended in a mistrial earlier this year after jurors admitted they had performed searches on the Internet about homicide by child abuse.
Feminists argue that the statute, if interpreted in this way, is so broad that it could be used to charge any woman who doesn’t follow precisely what the state thinks is the best pre-natal care.
Writing for Women’s ENews, Siobhan Morrissey, notes a previous case in which a woman spent 40 hours in labor and yet still refused to undergo the Caesarian section operation that her attending physicians recommended. In that case, doctors feared the fetus might be put into distress and considered invoking the child abuse law to force the woman to undergo the surgical procedure. She gave birth to a healthy child, however, before the law could be invoked.
South Carolina has also engaged in some extremely questionable law enforcement activities. In a case taken up by the Supreme Court, a South Carolina hospital took urine samples from pregnant women seeking prenatal care without their consent or knowledge. The hospital notified police about any women whose urine test showed evidence of drug use.
And, of course, there is the ever-present fear among feminists that laws that treat a fetus — even a late third-term fetus — as a person is the first step on the way to outlawing abortion.
Certainly some of South Carolina’s actions seem questionable, but at the same time if late third term abortions are ethically questionable — and polls show that most Americans are extremely uncomfortable with such abortions except to save a mother’s life — then smoking crack while in the 8th month of pregnancy seems equally questionable. Moreover, illegal drug use can do irreparable harm to what is essentially a fully formed human infant capable of living outside of the womb not to save a mother’s life or health, nor to erase the stigma of rape or incest, but simply to satisfy an addict’s need for drugs.
Even many hardcore supporters of abortion have come out strongly opposed to something like sex-selective abortion, and one wonders how those folks will oppose mothers who want to abort a female fetus while defending those who would expose dangerous drugs to fetuses that they fully intend to carry to term.
Source:
Cocaine user charged with fetal murder. Siobhan Morrissey, Women’s Enews, February 20, 2001.