M MAY STAND FOR MANY THINGS, BUT NOT MURDER

Melissa Ann Rowland won't win any medals for Mother of the Year. But
prosecuting her for her son's murder is a big mistake.

The 28-year-old Salt Lake City, Utah, woman has a history of mental
illness, drug abuse and child abuse. She surrendered two children for
adoption, and had two others taken away by the authorities.

Now she's accused of murder because, while pregnant with twins, she defied
her doctor's advice that her twins were in grave danger unless she had a
Caesarean section. When she did submit to surgery about two weeks later,
her son was stillborn and her daughter tested positive for cocaine and alcohol.

Rowland may be messed up, negligent, a substance abuser and, quite
possibly, mentally disturbed. But charging her with murder takes the
criminal law to a place where it doesn't belong - the personal decision by
a pregnant woman about whether she wants her body cut open.

If Melissa Ann Rowland was mentally ill, and incapable of making an
informed decision, she certainly isn't liable for her son's death. And if
she was competent, the law shouldn't punish her for making a decision that
was hers alone.

I understand the emotions surrounding this case. It sits at the
intersection of our desire to protect unborn children and our policy of
letting individuals make informed decisions about their medical care. The
big question is whether pregnant women lose the civil rights enjoyed by all
- - because they're pregnant.

"People have very appropriate feelings about pregnancy and the value of
fetal life," says Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates
for Pregnant Women, a legal advocacy group. But, she says, "we have a
problem with empowering doctors' advice with the force of criminal law."

Rowland's murder charge is based on her doctors' claim that her son would
have survived if she'd had a c-section sooner. But doctors can be wrong.
The same month that Rowland's doctors were urging her to have a Caesarean,
so were the doctors for Amber Marlowe, a woman in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.,
Marlowe was told her child was too big to deliver vaginally, but she and
her husband objected to surgery. So the hospital went to court and
persuaded a judge to order that a c-section be performed. But Marlowe went
to another hospital, where she gave birth, vaginally, to a healthy baby girl.

An even more compelling case involved Angela Carder, a Washington, D.C.,
woman who was 25 weeks pregnant in 1987 when she was diagnosed with
terminal cancer. Her relatives and doctors agreed on a course of treatment
that would extend her life for at least a few more weeks, but which
involved an increased risk to the fetus. They rejected a recommendation
that she have a c-section.

The hospital got a court order for a mandatory c-section. But shortly after
it was performed, both the baby and Angela Carder died. If you follow the
logic of the Rowland prosecution, the doctors and the hospital should have
been charged with double homicide.

I don't know why Rowland ignored her doctors' advice - if she didn't trust
them, if she feared physical harm to herself or if she was just mentally
ill. But it was her choice to make, and not someone else's. We reach a
slippery slope when we brand people as murderers based on the fallible
opinions of doctors. Even the venerable American College of Obstetricians
and Gynecologists has declared that when a doctor believes a Caesarean is
necessary to save the baby, the woman's decision should still rule.

"I've been frustrated many times by patients who didn't accept the voice of
reason, which I always flattered myself I was, and wanted to go a different
way, " says Dr. Howard Minkoff, chairman of obstetrics at Maimonides
Hospital in Brooklyn. "But ultimately it is their choice. It is their body,
their child."

We might wish that Rowland had made another choice. But no one was in a
better position to make that decision. And unless we want all pregnant
women to face the threat of criminal prosecution should they smoke, drink
alcohol, neglect their own health or make medical decisions their doctors
disagree with, we shouldn't allow cases like this one to make bad law.