TESTING NEW MOMS FOR DRUGS

You check into a hospital to deliver your baby. Without your consent,
a nurse who suspects you to be a substance abuser takes a vial of
your urine, checks it to see if you've engaged in any criminal
activity lately, and if so, turns the information over to police.
Your newborn is then whisked away and you're carted off to jail from
your hospital bed before you've even stopped bleeding from the
delivery.

Sound like sci-fi? Orwell?

Try South Carolina. That's where staff members at a public hospital
started turning over pregnant women they suspected of drug abuse.

Intended as a way to protect unborn fetuses from harm and to deter
drug abuse, the policy deterred nothing but prenatal care for the
most high-risk pregnancies. Nurses arbitrarily selected women they
thought might be drug users; predictably, most were poor and black.
The program also had no apparent effect in reducing overall drug use
in the area.

The practice was born of alarm over what many perceived to be an
epidemic in the use of crack cocaine among pregnant women in the late
1980s--a spike that eventually subsided under the weight of its own
devastation. But the program, in fact, was designed less to protect
the woman or her fetus than to prosecute her.

More important, the hospital's policy represented a dangerous
invasion of privacy, a new low on the slippery slope of personal
incursions that have been tolerated in the name of the war on drugs.

For too many years, the Supreme Court has abided numerous exceptions
to the 4th Amendment. That's the one that prohibits unreasonable
searches and protects privacy rights by compelling authorities to
convince a judge they need a warrant if they have cause to believe an
individual has broken the law.

Justices have allowed a variety of notable exceptions in what they
call "special circumstances." But with so many of these circumstances
now on the books, it's hard to tell what's so special about them
anymore. Customs Service workers pursuing promotions or sensitive
positions may be drug tested without a warrant. So may high school
students participating in interscholastic sports or transport workers
involved in train accidents. Motorists who have done nothing wrong
may be pulled over by police officers to be checked for drugs.

Finally, last week, the U.S. Supreme Court put an end to at least one
form of unreasonable government intrusion.

Using the threat of arrest and prosecution in order to intimidate
pregnant women into treatment, they decided in a 6-3 decision,
represented a means that did not justify the end. Law enforcement's
charter is plenty broad as it is.