National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) works on behalf of all pregnant women including pregnant women who have been arrested and charged with child abuse or some other crime because they continued a pregnancy to term in spite of a drug problem. These pregnant women are particularly unpopular. Liked or disliked, misunderstood or understood, their cases have huge legal implications for all pregnant women--potentially setting a devastating precedent that could establish special, separate legal rights for the fetus and the basis for punishing all pregnant women, including those who suffer miscarriages.
Documentary-short by STV Productions
The good news is that a surprisingly broad group of organizations oppose such arrests and prosecutions. Among these are the March of Dimes and the American Medical Association. They recognize that threatening women with arrest and frightening them away from treatment is bad for women and bad for babies. They understand that many of the women who come to police attention started to use drugs long before they became pregnant as a way of numbing the pain of violence and other trauma.
Because prosecutions don't actually protect children, and because the only way a woman who has a drug problem can be sure to avoid arrest is to have an abortion, no state legislature in the country has actually passed a law making it a crime for a woman with a drug problem to continue her pregnancy to term.
Even South Carolina's state legislature refused to pass such a law. Unfortunately, however, activist judges on the South Carolina Supreme Court rewrote state law to permit the arrest of any pregnant woman who even "risks" harm to her viable fetus. For example, Cornelia Whitner gave birth to a perfectly healthy baby. The baby, however, tested positive for cocaine.
Ms. Whitner was charged with child abuse based on the claims that a fetus is a child under state law. Although not a single residential treatment program designed to meet the needs of pregnant women existed in South Carolina at the time, Ms. Whitner pleaded guilty thinking it would help get her access to the treatment she needed.
Instead of treatment Ms. Whitner got eight years in prison.
When another South Carolina woman, Regina McKnight, suffered a stillbirth, she was charged with homicide by child abuse--even though the stillbirth was the result of an infection unrelated to Ms. McKnight's drug problem. Prosecutors in South Carolina knew that they could win a conviction for homicide simply by putting a low-income, African-American woman in front of a jury and telling them that this woman had used cocaine while pregnant. Ms. McKnight was convicted after only 15 minutes of deliberation. She was sentenced to twelve years in jail.
After Ms. McKnight had already served eight of those years, attorneys Rauch Wise and Susan Dunn from South Carolina (with the help of attorneys from the law firm Jenner and Block on behalf of the DKT Liberty Project and National Advocates for Pregnant Women), finally got the conviction overturned. The court ruled that Ms. McKnight had not been adequately represented at trial. Specifically, the court found that Ms. McKnight's public defender had ignored recent studies showing that "cocaine is no more harmful to a fetus than nicotine use, poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care, or other conditions commonly associated with the urban poor."
South Carolina still ranks number one in the country for the arrest of pregnant women and last in the amount of state dollars spent on drug treatment. National Advocates for Pregnant Women knows that many people who support the arrest of drug using pregnant women make assumptions about them. They cannot see beyond the color of their skin, or the fact that they are poor and pregnant, or that the woman is a "drug-user."
But those of us who work on behalf of "drug-using" women see something different. We see past the drug war and anti-abortion rhetoric. We see beyond the racism and the politics of blame. We see precious human beings who deserve support. These are women whose capacity for love, learning, giving, growing and healing never comes as a surprise to us.
Once such woman is Trena Walker, featured in the video above. I met Ms. Walker many years ago when my family was visiting South Carolina. Ms. Walker babysat for my children. What I remember most about her is that she was a remarkably sensitive and gifted child-care provider.
Her pregnancy and her struggle with addiction, however, could far too easily have become the excuse to lock her up. The ongoing political effort to separate the fetus from the mother in the eyes of the law has not only resulted in the arrest of women who seek abortion, but also scores of pregnant women in South Carolina who have continued their pregnancies to term.
With the aid of a talented advocate, Susan Dunn, Ms. Walker avoided what more than 90 other women in South Carolina experienced when they went to term in spite of drug problems. These women were turned over to the police by health-care providers, they were arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned, and then subjected to life-long shame and stigmatization.
These are women who love their children but who couldn't overcome an addiction faster than any other person with an addiction, including privileged public figures like Rush Limbaugh and Daryl Strawberry.
All of these women are precious, and they all deserve to be treated with dignity, as human beings entitled to treatment that works, and support that will enable them and their children to thrive.
Follow Reproductive Justice on Twitter: www.twitter.com/STVNewMedia
Jessica Zucker, Ph.D.: PBS's 'This Emotional Life:' Connecting With Baby Before Birth
Research reveals that perinatal and postpartum mood disorders are often linked to striving for perfection. Here are some psychological meditations for cultivating a conscious pregnancy.
Many people still believe that a pregnant woman who uses any amount of an illegal drug will inevitably harm or even kill her fetus. This is not surprising based on the extraordinary misinformation that appears so frequently in popular media. But media hype is not the same as science. As the National Institute for Drug Abuse has reported, “Many recall that ‘crack babies,’ or babies born to mothers who used crack cocaine while pregnant, were at one time written off by many as a lost generation... It was later found that this was a gross exaggeration.” The U.S. Sentencing Commission concluded, “research indicates that the negative effects from prenatal exposure to cocaine, in fact, are significantly less severe than previously believed.” And in 2009, the New York Times tried to set the record straight in a story entitled: The Epidemic That Wasn’t. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27coca.html) In this story, leading researchers, including Dr. D. Frank who is also featured in this on-line video: Prenatal Drug Exposure: Award-Winning Pediatrician Discusses What The Science Tells Us (http://vimeo.com/3916613) explain that while researchers have found some effects of prenatal exposure to cocaine, those “effects are less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco — two legal substances that are used much more often by pregnant women, despite health warnings.”
I believe the writer of this piece is a little far into liberal land. A perfectly healthy baby was born with cocaine in his system? That seems to be a contridictory sentence. The justification that some studies show that concaine is no more harmful to babies than nicotine, malnutrition or lack of prenatal care is a farce. Those things aren't good for babies either. But then one can only speculate about the good sense of someone that leaves any child, let alone their own, in the care of a drug addict.
How can it possibly be a good idea to allow mothers (but apparently not fathers) to keep their children when they are current drug users? "Mommy is trying to stay clean but fell off the wagon and is high on crack again but when she wakes up she'll be real happy the state hasn't taken her babies away." What about the best interests of the child? Could we worry about that for a little bit?
The whole bit that mothers wouldn't take children to the doctor out of fear they would be taken away is a red herring. Unless the kid has been abused, neglected or has drugs in his system the state won't be involved.
I have seen family members up close and personal on drugs...specifically meth and cocaine...and they are poison! I have no idea why you would want something so harmful and deadly to not only the user, but everyone else around them, to be legalized. Have you ever seen what a person can do when they are high on cocaine? That's absurd. Unless you are an addict yourself, I just can't comprehend why you would want something so deadly to be legalized.
If you ask me, I think cigarettes should be illegal as well and I am glad that the government passed the bill to make it illegal to smoke in public. I don't want to die of lung cancer and neither do my children.
Why is it that some people will twist our laws into knots in an effort to "save the babies" while ignoring the fact that the babies are inside of another human being? If they wanted to truly address the problem of children born to addicted mothers then they'd pass laws mandating funding for treatment and prenatal clinics for the poor instead of creating criminals out of them and throwing their children into an overburdened foster care system.
I do not have an answer. I do not know if one exists. I am, however, quite sure that hurling metaphorical thunderbolts does nothing except make people "feel good" about their own response to the problem. Money is not enough, but any good solution is going to be expensive.
oh no!!!!! separate legal rights for a fetus! oh the inhumanity!
For example, suppose I need you to filter my blood for nine months or I will die. You could volunteer to help me, but if you did, you could bail out at any time. If a fetus has rights equal to, but not greater than, the mother's, the situation is the same. When you decide you can't take it any more the situation is this: if I can make it on my own, good; otherwise, I die. If a fetus has equal rights, the situation will be the same.
Let me clarify, up until the heart starts beating (7 weeks), you can have an abortion. That's because you aren't killing anything in the process. Because the child isn't alive, the Constitution doesn't apply to them. You can do what you please until that point.
"It is a fetus. As such it is a tiny piece of tissue within a woman's womb."
This is the concept you're missing. It isn't just a fetus because it has an independent beating heart. It is a completely separate entity, complete with its own organs, movement, etc. It can kick around at will completely independent from your thoughts. You have no control over how it moves around or how active it is. This proves that it's a separate entity and, as such, has its own separate rights. The fact that it's inside you is a mute point because it's not you.
Your analogy regarding kidneys is incorrect because I am a separate person. It doesn't matter if I'm your son or not, I'm still entitled to the rights of my body because those rights do not infringe upon your rights or anybody else's rights. I can get tattoo's, surgery.
If you don't want the responsibility that comes with getting pregnant...don't have sex.
And if you want to have sex, get fixed.
If you're unwilling to do both, then you have to deal with having another human being who is dependent upon you.