IN ALABAMA, A CRACKDOWN ON PREGNANT DRUG USERS

ANDALUSIA, Ala. -- A day after she gave birth in 2006, Tiffany
Hitson, 20, sat on her front porch crying, barefoot and handcuffed. A
police officer hovered in the distance.

Ms. Hitson's newborn daughter had traces of cocaine and marijuana in
its system, and the young woman, baby-faced herself, had fallen afoul
of a tough new state law intended to protect children from drugs, and
a local prosecutor bent on pursuing it. She made arrangements for the
baby's care, and headed off to a year behind bars.

"I couldn't believe it," recalled Ms. Hitson, who was released in
November after spending much of the first year of her daughter's life
at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Alabama.

Two worlds are colliding in this piney woods backcountry in southern
Alabama: casual drug use and a local district attorney unsettled that
children or fetuses might be affected by it. The result is an unusual
burst of prosecutions in which young women using drugs are shocked to
find themselves in the cross hairs for harming their children, even
before giving birth.

Over an 18-month period, at least eight women have been prosecuted
for using drugs while pregnant in this rural jurisdiction of barely
37,000, a tally without any recent parallel that women's advocates
have been able to find. The district attorney, Greg L. Gambril,
acknowledges the number puts him at the "forefront," at least among
Alabama prosecutors. Similar cases have come up elsewhere, usually
with limited success. But Alabama, and in particular this hilly,
remote terrain just above the Florida Panhandle, is pursuing these
cases with special vigor.

In Maryland, the state's highest court in 2006 threw out the
convictions of two women whose babies were born with cocaine in their
bloodstreams, ruling that punishment was not the right deterrent.
Last year, the New Mexico Supreme Court rejected a woman's
child-abuse conviction in a similar case, declaring a fetus was not a
child. Some doctors and advocacy groups maintain that the effects of
drugs on pregnant women and their fetuses are not fully known; in
Alabama, though, these arguments have yet to be officially made.

A cultural clash, unfolding within the confined world of Covington
County, is at the origin of this prosecutorial crusade. Here, unlike
in other jurisdictions, women are not appealing their convictions,
and lawyers and doctors talk about these cases reluctantly, if at
all. Too many people know one another in these quiet little towns
that fade abruptly into the countryside.

There has not been a murder here in over three years, the prosecutor
said. But a year ago a newborn died at the local hospital, and the
mother had traces of methamphetamines in her system. Doctors told the
police that the infant's premature birth could be attributed to
maternal drug use, and she was charged with "chemical endangerment of
child," which carries a sentence of 10 years to life in prison.

"In my jurisdiction, a baby being born dead because of drug abuse is
a huge deal," Mr. Gambril said.

Mr. Gambril makes little distinction between fetus and child. He said
his duty was to protect both -- though the Alabama law he uses makes
no reference to unborn children, and was primarily intended to
protect youngsters from exposure to methamphetamine laboratories.

"When drugs are introduced in the womb, the child-to-be is
endangered," Mr. Gambril said. "It is what I call a continuing
crime." He added that the purpose of the statute was to guarantee
that the child has "a safe environment, a drug-free environment."

"No one is to say whether that environment is inside or outside the
womb," he said, and no judge or other authority in Alabama has so far
disagreed.

Covington County is an isolated rural terrain where drugs are a
recreational outlet in the absence of others, where the police found
nearly 200 methamphetamine laboratories in the first years of the
decade, and where they made more arrests for abusing the drug than
anywhere else in the state.

"This is a meth town," said Ms. Hitson's grandmother, Shirley Hinson,
who helped take care of the baby while Tiffany was in prison.
Speaking of youth here, Ms. Hinson said, "There's nothing for them to do."

The county is the kind of place where young women -- white,
working-class, on probation for other offenses -- sometimes take a
chance while pregnant.

"I made the biggest mistake of my life & did some drugs with her
father right before I went into labor, unaware I was about to have
her," Ms. Hitson wrote to the court from the Covington County Jail,
in neat schoolgirl script, pleading to be released after her arrest
in October 2006. "Please, please let me spend this most important
time with my baby," she wrote.

But the judge had set bond at $200,000 -- Ms. Hitson had earlier been
charged in connection with a break-in, and with credit-card fraud --
and in jail she stayed.

The environment can be unforgiving. Rachel Barfoot, 31, who had been
charged before with beating her niece, told her probation officer
that she was pregnant. When she tested positive for cocaine, she was arrested.

"I was in shock," said Ms. Barfoot. "I told the truth, but the truth
got me nowhere," she said in an interview. Three months pregnant,
already a mother of four, she spent five weeks in the Covington County Jail.

"It was hell," said Ms. Barfoot, now jobless and struggling. Police
affidavits make it clear that local doctors are cooperating in these
investigations.

The women are sent off to county jails, state prisons, or drug
rehabilitation clinics, and often emerge bitter at the collaboration
of police, prosecutors, judges, doctors and social workers they say
is less keen on help -- Mr. Gambril insists otherwise -- than punishment.

"In Covington County, I don't think they're interested in helping
mothers," Ms. Hitson said. "They're just sending people straight to
prison. It doesn't help their drug problems."

A few of the local defense lawyers express similar sentiments: "None
of those cases should have been brought," said Rod Sylvester, who
represents another woman charged with chemical endangerment. "It's an
overreaching."

But others bring up the powerful, unspoken community sanction against
the combination of drugs and pregnant women. And so far, none of the
women have risked trial.

"Our ultimate goal is to protect mothers and children," Mr. Gambril said.

Meanwhile, Shirley Hinson, Ms. Hitson's grandmother, is still furious
over Tiffany's year of imprisonment. "They took something away from
my granddaughter and my grandbaby they can't give back," she said.
"They made an example out of Tiffany. That's all they did."