DRUG WARRIORS JOIN FORCES WITH ABORTION FOES

Regina McKnight is a pathetic crackhead who has no business having babies.
The 24-year-old Conway, S.C., mother of three ought to be sentenced to a
supervised drug treatment program and subjected to random drug tests.

Instead, she faces 12 years in prison. In a verdict that sets a dangerous
precedent, a South Carolina jury found her guilty Wednesday of killing her
unborn child by using cocaine while she was pregnant. This may be the first
time that a woman has been found guilty of homicide because she used
illegal narcotics during her pregnancy.

Posing as a child's avenger, prosecutor Bert Von Herrmann said, "The state
needed to press forward because a child ended up dead." Don't be fooled.
This case is not about protecting children but rather about providing an
opportunity to merge the interests of anti-abortionists and war-on-drugs
hard-liners.

For a decade, the anti-abortion movement --- unable to reverse Roe v. Wade
has conducted a guerrilla war on reproductive rights, chipping away at
late-term abortions, fighting the abortion pill, forcing parental
notification for teenagers wanting the procedure. If anti-abortionists can
persuade a jury to consider a fatal injury to a fetus a homicide, they win
a major battle.

Indeed, the U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the so-called
Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which would make it a crime to kill or
injure a fetus during the commission of one of 60 federal crimes. It
represents a full frontal assault on Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme
Court ruling legalizing abortion.

And of course, the hard-liners of the so-called "war on drugs" want to
incarcerate every man, woman and child who has ever sampled illegal
narcotics, no matter how many Americans end up under lock and key.
President Bush's new drug czar, John Walters, is an extremist who has
mocked drug treatment as "the latest manifestation of the liberals'
commitment to a 'therapeutic state' in which the government serves as the
agent of personal rehabilitation."

Even proponents of drug treatment admit that it is no magic bullet. Those
most dedicated to their own "personal rehabilitation" may experience many
setbacks and slip-ups; among recovering alcohol and drug addicts, relapses
are common. And forced rehab is most difficult with irresponsible
crackheads such as McKnight, who says she is pregnant again.

McKnight and her fellow addicts often destroy their children, if not with
outright abuse, then through neglect. Children of crackheads go hungry.
They are left alone to burn up in house fires or be molested by predators.
They are not sent to school. Those children need the intervention of state
authorities.

But there were more sensible ways to force McKnight to get clean. If the
state of South Carolina cared about her children, it would find a decent
foster home for them and give McKnight a year to get her act together. If
she didn't, the state should have gone to court to terminate her parental
rights and put up her kids for adoption.

Even a sentence of forced long-term contraception --- using Norplant, for
example --- would have made more sense. The use of Norplant as a sentence
for often-pregnant crackheads is controversial, but it would have been less
harsh than 12 years of incarceration. After all, it is fully reversible and
would give McKnight the opportunity to become a mother again if she ever
broke free of her cocaine addiction.

But that would require a drug policy that actually wants to see drug
addicts -- including poor and unsympathetic crackheads like McKnight --
redeem themselves. That's not the drug policy America has put in place.
Ours is a "war on drugs" that makes war on drug users.