Crime And The Myth Of The Perfect Mother

It was not, apparently, a hard call to make. It took the South
Carolina jury only 15 minutes to decide that Regina McKnight belongs
in prison, that she was guilty of killing the child in her womb by
smoking crack cocaine during pregnancy.

McKnight, 24, delivered a stillborn baby 35 weeks into her pregnancy.
Doctors found cocaine in the systems of both mother and child, and
McKnight was prosecuted for homicide. She was convicted and sentenced
last week to 12 years in prison.

The case has alarmed some women's groups, who worry that it could
embolden the government to intrude on pregnant women in other ways--to
punish them for drinking or smoking or not getting enough sleep, if
that behavior might harm their developing babies.

Others see McKnight's treatment as harsh, but not heartless; a
hard-line approach that reflects our frustration over what to do about
drug-addicted moms and signals our weariness with the societal
problems their dereliction of maternal duty has caused.

What will it take, we wonder, to get their attention, to stem the tide
of neglected children flooding our foster-care system and filling our
juvenile halls.

Money. An Orange County woman--she has adopted four of the eight
children born to a drug-addicted mother--has started a program that
offers $200 to drug-abusing women who get sterilized.

The permanent loss of parenting rights. New laws have limited to six
months the time addicted parents have to kick drugs before losing
their babies to adoption.

Or maybe the threat of jail.

There's a public picture of Regina McKnight that fits tidily into our
image of the irresponsible crack-head mom. She is unmarried,
uneducated, on welfare; the mother of three other kids who are all
being raised by relatives. While living in a homeless shelter awaiting
trial, she got pregnant once again, with a baby who'll be delivered
behind prison walls.

But there is another portrait that her supporters paint of a poor
woman with no coping skills and limited intelligence--her IQ is
72--who never used drugs until someone offered them to her at her
mother's funeral. A woman who desperately wanted her dead baby, who
named her, mourned her and responded to the jury's guilty verdict by
crying out for her own mother.

"Regina McKnight didn't have a chance," says Wyndi Anderson, executive
director of South Carolina Advocates for Pregnant Women, a group
fighting laws that criminalize addiction during pregnancy.

"The jury was reacting to our romanticized myth of mother: 'How could
she do drugs when she knew it could kill her baby.' We want motherhood
to be some sort of magic thing that overcomes addiction, poverty . . .
that allows [abused] women to birth perfect children and to raise them
perfectly."

Across the country, states are stepping up efforts to emphasize the
responsibilities of pregnancy. At least 17 have enacted civil laws
making it possible for authorities to seize the newborns of women who
test positive for drugs during pregnancy. Others require pregnant
addicts to enroll in treatment programs. And a handful--including
Texas, Georgia and Pennsylvania--have filed criminal charges of
neglect against women whose newborns were exposed in utero to drugs.

But, so far, only South Carolina has explicitly extended criminal
child-abuse laws to cover fetuses, subjecting women who use drugs
during pregnancy to prison sentences of 10 years or more.

"It's supposed to reflect our concern for the babies, but it's really
just a new way to prosecute poor, drug-addicted women," Anderson says.
"If this were really about healthy babies, we'd see services like
health care, counseling. . . . This is a convenient way to dispose of
the problem. Lock Regina McKnight up, and you're done."

From her courtroom in Los Angeles County's Dependency Court,
Guillermina Byrne sees the fallout of our failed war on drugs--as she
decides the fate of a daily procession of children who have been taken
away from drug-addicted moms, and the desperate women trying to get
them back.

"I've had mothers really, really try," she says. "They get treatment,
and they go to meetings, and they stay sober for months. Then two days
before I'm set to return the children to them, they disappear or show
up with a dirty [drug] test."

Others get their children back and remain sober for three or four
years, "then they relapse and wind up in court [for neglect] again.
"And I think, 'What are you doing. How many chances can I give you.' "
Byrne has struggled to understand the lure of a drug so strong it
makes mothers abandon their young.

"We had a [court] conference with a medical doctor who explained how
long-term drug use can change the structure of the brain, the way it
processes joy, comfort, happiness, contentment," she says. So the
simple pleasures of motherhood don't tend to register, and it can take
years away from drugs for good judgment to return.

"So I asked the doctor," Byrne says, "given what you're saying, is it
ever really safe to return a child to a drug-addicted mother. And he
said, 'As a doctor who works with these mothers, I'd have to say yes.
But as a pediatrician who treats these children, I'd have to say no.'
That was a painful thing for us to hear."

Anderson's view--born of her own experience--is not quite so bleak.
She was raised by alcoholic parents and spent her adolescence battling
an addiction to drugs and alcohol. She's been sober for 14 years.
"Neither one of my parents is sober, but they're still good parents,"
she says. "They did a lot of drugs when I was a kid, but nobody ever
came and took me away. And I turned out all right. So I know these
women are not the horrible monsters we make them out to be."

What they need, she says, is not punishment, but treatment that
respects the mother-child bond; that honors, not diminishes, their
efforts at mothering, "I understand the frustration with these women,"
she says. "I understand why folks get angry. But we need to understand
that this is not a simple problem. We can't say, 'Let's save the
children and give up on their mothers.'

"The children need to hear that the system cares about their mothers
too. Otherwise we're conditioning a whole generation of kids to
believe that their mothers are throwaways, that we can do without
them. If we value the children, we have to value the mother, the woman."