HOSPITAL DRUG TESTS REQUIRE CONSENT

WASHINGTON - Public hospitals cannot test pregnant women for drugs and turn
the results over to police without consent, the Supreme Court said
Wednesday in a ruling that buttressed the Constitution's protection against
unreasonable searches.

Some women who tested positive for drugs at a South Carolina public
hospital were arrested from their beds shortly after giving birth.

The justices ruled 6-3 that such testing without patients' consent violates
the Constitution even though the goal was to prevent women from harming
their fetuses by using crack cocaine.

"It's a very, very important decision in protecting the right to privacy of
all Americans," said Priscilla Smith, lawyer for the Center for
Reproductive Law and Policy, who represented the South Carolina women. "It
reaffirms that pregnant women have that same right to a confidential
relationship with their doctors."

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court that while the ultimate goal
of the hospital's testing program may have been to get women into drug
treatment, "the immediate objective of the searches was to generate
evidence for law enforcement purposes in order to reach that goal."

When hospitals gather evidence "for the specific purpose of incriminating
those patients, they have a special obligation to make sure that the
patients are fully informed about their constitutional rights," Stevens said.

South Carolina Attorney General Charles Condon, who as a local prosecutor
in Charleston began the testing program, issued a statement saying the
program can continue if police get a search warrant or the patient's
consent. "There is no right of a mother to jeopardize the health and safety
of an unborn child through her own drug abuse."

Condon developed the policy along with officials at the Medical University
of South Carolina, a Charleston hospital that treats indigent patients. The
women were arrested under the state's child-endangerment law, but their
lawyers contended the policy was counterproductive and would deter women
from seeking prenatal care.

The decision reversed a federal appeals court ruling that said the South
Carolina hospital's drug-testing policy was a valid effort to reduce crack
cocaine use by pregnant women.

The hospital began the drug testing in 1989 during the crack cocaine epidemic.

Ten women sued the hospital in 1993, saying the policy violated the
Constitution. The hospital dropped the policy the following year, but by
then police had arrested 30 women.