HIGH COURT TO STUDY HOSPITAL'S ROLE IN ARRESTING DRUG USERS

Should Medical Records Be Shared With The Police?

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court, tackling a dispute over women's privacy,
said Monday it will decide whether public hospitals can test pregnant
patients for drug use and tell police who tested positive.

The court must determine whether a south Carolina hospital's policy aimed
at detecting pregnant women who use crack cocaine violates the
Constitution's protections against unreasonable searches.

"On one level, the question before the court is whether pregnant women have
lesser constitutional rights than other Americans," said Simon Heller of
the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, one of the lawyers representing
10 women who tested positive.

Some of the women were arrested "right out their hospital beds, still
bleeding from having given birth," he said, as the state used its
child-endangerment law to prosecute women who use illegal drugs while
pregnant.

Lynn Paltrow of the Women's Law Center, another of their lawyers, called
the policy "bad medicine" because it deters women from seeking prenatal care.

South Carolina Attorney General Charlie Condon said the case will not deter
the state's efforts. "South Carolina's policy of protecting unborn children
from their mother's cocaine abuse will continue even at public hospitals,"
he said. "Search warrants can be used as well as consents to search."

Condon added: "There is no constitutional right for a pregnant mother to
use drugs. The unborn child has a constitutional right to protection from
its mother's drug abuse."

The hospital discontinued its policy after a 1993 lawsuit was filed, but
police already had arrested 30 maternity patients.

The justices' decision, expected sometime in 2001, could determine whether
the policy ever gets reinstated and whether other hospitals consider
adopting similar tactics.

The South Carolina law makes it a crime to "refuse or neglect to provide
the proper care and attention" so that a child "is endangered or is likely
to be endangered." The state's Supreme Court has ruled that a viable fetus
- - one able to live outside the uterus - is a child under the law and has
upheld the law's use against pregnant women.

South Carolina prosecutors have brought such cases dozens of times since
1989, and the nation's highest courts refused two years ago to review such
prosecutions. The highest courts in Florida, Kentucky, Nevada and Ohio have
disallowed them, however.

At the Medical University of South Carolina, a public hospital in
Charleston, officials decided in 1989 to help prosecutors. If a woman's
urine test indicated cocaine use, she was arrested for distributing the
drug to a minor.

In early 1990, the policy was changed to give drug-using patients a choice
between being arrested and enrolling for treatment.

Ten women sued the hospital and others in 1993, contending among other
things that the urine testing, performed without court warrants, amounted
to unreasonable searches that violated the Fourth Amendment.

The hospital treats indigent patients, many of them black. Of the 30 women
arrested, 27 were black. The lawsuit alleged that the hospital policy was
racially discriminatory, but that argument was not raised in the Supreme
Court appeal.

After a six-week trial, a federal jury ruled against the women. The 4th
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that verdict last July.