STATES CRACK DOWN TO SHIELD FETUSES FROM DRUGS

CHICAGO - Two Midwestern states have passed laws this spring that allow for
the civil detention of pregnant women who abuse drugs or alcohol, signaling
that a fetal-protection movement that largely failed in the courts over the
last 15 years might find a more receptive audience in statehouses.

On Friday, Wisconsin's Senate approved a measure that puts exposed fetuses
under the jurisdiction of juvenile courts and permits those courts to order
the expectant mother confined to a treatment program, a physician's office,
a hospital or a relative's home.

That bill, in response to a case in which a cocaine user was confined in
suburban Milwaukee in 1995, originally passed the state Assembly last
November. Sponsors say they expect Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson to sign
the bill into law within a few weeks.

Once signed, it would take effect immediately.

In March, South Dakota's Gov. William Janklow signed a pair of bills
legalizing the involuntarily commitment to a treatment facility for nearly
the entire nine-month gestational period of a pregnant abuser of alcohol or
nonprescribed drugs. The laws take effect July 1.

Similar bills have been introduced in a total of 12 states this year,
compared to seven - all of which failed - in 1997. Civil liberties groups
are voicing strong concerns.

``If two states pass this kind of legislation, others will feel really
emboldened,'' said Louise Melling, associate director of the American Civil
Liberties Union's Reproductive Rights Project. ``You do have to wonder how
people are thinking about women and what the government can demand that
they do.''

But politicians who say they are horrified by the effects of fetal-alcohol
syndrome and uterine drug exposure have little sympathy for such views.

``No woman has a right to do that to a child,'' said Republican Rep. Scott
Eccarius of South Dakota, who sponsored one of his state's bills.

It is not uncommon for women to engage in behavior that could hurt their
developing babies. A pediatrics journal estimated in 1992 that 11 percent
of fetuses across America are exposed to illegal drugs.

Efforts to prosecute as criminals women who endanger their fetuses have
brought mixed results in the past 15 years, with many cases dropped and
most lower-court convictions overturned on appeal.

In July of 1996, however, the South Carolina Supreme Court let stand the
manslaughter conviction of a woman who shot herself in the abdomen when she
was more than 20 weeks' pregnant, killing the fetus.

In Wisconsin, the corporation counsel for Waukesha County decided to try
the civil route when an obstetrician reported that his then-24-year-old
patient was using cocaine, drugging her developing baby. A juvenile court
judge ordered the county sheriff to take the fetus - and of course, the
woman who carried it - to the hospital.

The expectant mother, known in court records as Angela M.W., was not under
arrest, nor charged with any crime. But she was not free to leave treatment.

She stayed for three weeks until giving birth to her third child, a boy
christened in court files as Bobby L.W. Cocaine was present in the baby's
meconium - his first solid waste - but not in his bloodstream. His mother's
parental rights have been terminated.

Wisconsin's appeals court agreed with the lower court that the state's
interest in a fetal life outweighed the mother's right to freedom of
movement by the third trimester - rooting the argument in Roe vs. Wade, the
landmark abortion case that outlined a woman's choice to continue or
terminate a pregnancy.

The state Supreme Court, however, said last year that the matter was for
lawmakers to decide - a common response in fetal protection cases.

Kathleen Blatz, now chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court,
introduced a measure in 1988, when she was a state senator, providing for
involuntary commitment of pregnant women abusing cocaine, heroin and other
hard drugs - not marijuana.

After hearing testimony about crack babies, she recalled, she thought: ``We
keep looking at how to help the child after it's born. What good does that
do anybody?''

Her bill passed quietly, she added, with the major opposition coming from
doctors who did not want to be forced to report their pregnant patients'
drug use to authorities.

Since then, Blatz said, ``more than a handful but probably fewer than 100''
women have been committed under the law, and some of them received stays
when they entered outpatient treatment programs instead.

Commitments to residential programs generally are not for more than 28
days, she said.

This year, lawmakers defeated an attempt to add alcohol to Minnesota's list
of substances that can lead to commitment. The bill as passed requires the
medical community to educate patients about the damage that too much
drinking can cause a fetus.

In California, a bill that would have defined drug use in late pregnancy as
criminal child abuse failed in committee last month.