Women receiving prenatal care at the Medical University of South Carolina give urine specimens. This is pretty routine. What is not routine is that the specimens are not just tested for sugar & protein (both indicators or medical complications), but are also tested for cocaine. And the names of positive testees are released to the local police.
The actual release of names has been on hold since 1993 pending the outcome of lawsuits, but the law is still on the books. The USSC is set to review the case on next year’s docket.
Any thoughts?
I’m no supporter of a woman’s right to poison her baby with crack, but it would seem that this policy would just cause addicted women to avoid getting pre-natal care entirely & hope they weren’t high when they went into labor…
Sue from El Paso
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
How significantly different is this situation from the laws that require physicians to report possible battering incidents? Isn’t that sort of law common?
I don’t think the two are comparable. In a case where a physician (or teacher, or social care worker) is required to report evidence of abuse, there’s just that…evidence. The physician would see bruises, cuts, or injuries that are common in abuse cases. For instance, if a child says he bumped into the wall, yet he has scars from many past injuries and a cigarette burn on his arm, the doctor has evidence that the child may be covering something up. He would then report this.
Testing all pregnant women’s urine, though, is presupposing that all women would take crack and harm their child. This would be more comparable to going to a neighborhood where a rape took place and testing all male citizens’ DNA.
And to answer the title of this thread…no, South Carolina is not in the U.S…it is a Confederate State, as evidenced by the flag flown on top of it’s main government building.
I’m not advocating either policy but I have heard arguments that the effects of both policies are the same: patients who need medical help will avoid physicians because of fear of arrest.
I read the article at the link Majormd provided, and it said that the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a verdict against the women last July. The verdict seems to have said that the tests were “minimally intrusive.” They appear to be saying that the tests aren’t much different than a physician observing a patient in an exam room.
I also gotta disagree: SC is a state, but only because we make it. Not ‘we’ exactly, I live in NC and we tried to… well, I’m from WY so not ‘me’–WY wasn’t even a state back then. O, and I even wasn’t born then, so…do whatcha want.
Yeah, yeah…I was only joking about the flag/state thing. It’s all anyone talks about here, it seems.
I can see what you mean, that the effects might be the same. I don’t think the problem is JUST the effects, though. The issue here is illegal search. I think it would be okay to notify the police if an expecting mother came in, had track marks, appeared high, etc. Then, the police should go through the legal steps to get a urine test from the patient. In this case, the effects would probably be the same…people using drugs would be less likely to go get prenatal care. This would need to be addressed as a separate issue. I’m not sure how to go about that.
I don’t think it’s right to drug test every woman that comes in for prenatal care.
I do think it’s necessary to test women when there is evidence of drug use, but only through the proper channels for drug testing.
Sorry. I thought you were serious about SC not being a state. But I knew Majormd was joking.
The step in the process that I think makes the two most similar is that the physician can be held to be breaking the law if they don’t report abuse. There may be many reasons for non-report: gross error, misdiagnosis, unwillingness to comply–all of which make the physician culpable–or maybe the physician, based upon her familiarity with the case, decides to try to treat the patient(s) rather than turn the case over to the police. The last would seem to be a medical decision rather than a legal one–and the physician may not now have that option.
The real question is, why should a physician be considered, in some situations, an extension of the police?
If they weren’t, could they be sued for not maintaining doctor-patient confidentiality if the physician decided it was in the best interests of everybody to notify authorities? Like someone might rat out their neighbor?
Seeing as SC contains Bob Jones “university”-whose attendess believe that the Pope is the Antichrist, and the world was created 7000 years ago, and that demons possess Bill Clinton, I would have to say that SC is somewhere in the mid-13th century!
All this, of course, shows how screwed up our political/religious system had become: In one case, there is physical abuse of a child from the uncontrolled rage of another, which should be a police action. In the other, there is substance abuse which is mostly a psychological/medical dependancy and should be treated as such - not a criminal matter. But once our laws entered the slippery path of trying to regulate one’s own behaviour, there seems to be great difficulty turning it around.
Thought I might bring up that curious document, the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment reads:
The article said:
I don’t know anything about the ‘special needs’ exception to the Fourth Amendment; we need one of our legal eagles to put a word in. But whatever it is, it would seem to me that the women’s lawyers are right: if the Supremes affirm the Fourth Circuit, then the ‘exception’ would be so big as to virtually negate the Amendment itself. Given the Court’s tendency in recent years to take the Fourth Amendment all too lightly, IMO, I’m genuinely worried about this case.
But many people view the first case as a psychological/medical problem, and there are people who view the second as abuse of a child. In fact, that is SC’s justification for the law.
Apparently, the court isn’t going to decide this one until 2001?
Where drugs can harm the fetus, looking at drug abuse by a pregnant woman as child abuse is a perfectly reasonable attitude, IMO. It’s the jump to justifying the law that troubles me.
The Fourth Amendment guarantees our protection from unreasonable searches and seizures. To riffle through our belongings and records, the authorities need a warrant, for which they need probable cause. Being pregnant isn’t ‘probable cause.’
South Carolina and the Fourth Circuit have concluded that, since the women are at the doctor and getting a urine test anyway, it’s no big deal if the state hospital insists on testing for drug use at the same time, and passes the results to the prosecutors.
To me, this is along the lines of them having your accountant, insurance agent, stockbroker, etc., when they’re reviewing your financial situation in their various ways, keep an eye out for assets and income unexplained by your job, and reporting anything untoward to the authorities. In short, it’s the sort of invasion of privacy that the Fourth Amendment was intended to protect against.
South Carolina’s justification for an exception to/weakening of the Fourth Amendment is that kids are at risk here. Another analogy is to households with guns, which (as yesterday’s tragedy reinforces) place kids at risk. With this same justification, the state should have the right to periodically inspect households that have both children and guns, to make sure the guns are properly stored so that the kids can’t play with them.
I’m for gun control, but I think this would be an abomination. But to me, there is little to distinguish the South Carolina law from this sort of scenario.
rocks - in the battering situation, the physician (or whomever) is presumably already looking at probable cause. That’s the difference.
The Fourth Amendment is one of a number of elements in our system of jurisprudence that says the law has to treat us as good citizens until there’s a substantive reason to suspect otherwise. That’s what the South Carolina situation does fundamental damage to.
As I understand things, the USSC decide during the course of a year what cases they will accept for consideration in the next year & years begin on the 1st Monday in October.
So this case will begin to be considered in Oct 2000, with a decision published sometime in 2001.
With all due respect, Freedom, plenty of kids have been killed while playing around with guns in houses that weren’t crack houses.
Sue - you’ve got it right: they decide, this term, which cases to take on next term, which starts the first Monday in October, and will run to June 2001.
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Not that it’s gone to my head or anything.
I have two problems with this law. First, I consider it a violation of the 4th Amendment. This point has already been addressed. Second, the idea that a pregnant woman using cocaine is a form of child abuse. Everyone here seems to agree that it is child abuse, but where does that leave Roe v. Wade? Let me get this straight. A woman can legally kill her fetus, she just can’t get it high?
The issue is quality of life. A pregnant woman doing drugs does far more than just get the child high. It destroys developing brain cells and could harm other organs or tissues. The child will come out of the womb, if it does at all, as an extrememly developmentally challenged child, depending on how much drugs were in the mother’s system. I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I were a fetus with a choice (that almost sounds like the name of a band), I would choose to not come out at all. Life is difficult as it is without making things harder from the get-go.
This SC law neatly pushed the proposition that the state has the right to invade the privacy of a woman’s body as her own, and thus by extension, determine that a fetus is a “being” to be protected as though a separate entity - a back door Pro-Life intrusion. I will point everyone to the other thread on the same kind of subject: http://boards.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum7/HTML/000157.html
I really have no desire to get into that debate, but…
I think of a fetus unwanted by the mother as a tumor, and a wanted fetus as a baby. That is the woman’s choice. Unless the state comes and rip the tumor out of her body and take the responsibility of turning the tumor into a baby and provide total care for it afterwards, the state has no rights that can be greater than that of the woman’s. Now we cannot say that all woman are equally careful and educated regarding taking care of a baby. Many are good at it, and many are bad at it. Being bad at it includes poor nutrition as well as drug abuse, etc. The state can help educate and care, but to make it criminal if a woman is bad at it? What if the woman thinks of the fetus as tumor, such as from rape or incest?
