WHEN MOTHERS BECOME CRIMINAL

"CRIMINALIZING Motherhood" is how Silja J.A. Talvi, writing for The Nation,
titled her piece on the case of a woman in South Carolina who is serving 12
years in prison for the "crime" of giving birth to a stillborn child.

Writes Talvi: "As Regina McKnight grieved and held her third daughter
Mercedes' lifeless body, she could never have imagined that she was about
to become the first woman in America convicted for murder by using cocaine
while pregnant."

McKnight's plight is instructive not just to American women, but to women
all over the world, especially here in the Philippines where incumbent
officials--and other aspirants for public office--seem all too willing to
barter women's rights for the electoral support of the Catholic hierarchy
and other conservative elements.

What will happen when motherhood becomes, as a matter of law, and policy,
not a right and a choice but a duty and obligation? Here's McKnight's
story, and what could be in store for all women under a rigid, punitive
"pro-life" regime.

As Talvi recounts, McKnight was a seasonal tobacco farm worker with a
tenth-grade (third year high school) education who was homeless,
drug-addicted and "trying to cope with the recent loss of her mother, who
was run over by a truck." She never received any help for her drug
problems, not surprising considering, as Talvi points out, that South
Carolina ranks lowest in the US for spending on drug and alcohol treatment
programs.

INTO THIS dismal picture steps former Republican Attorney General Charlie
Condon, now running for the US Senate, who was determined to apply a child
abuse law, the only one in the US, that covers "viable fetuses." At least
100 women in the state have subsequently faced criminal charges for using
drugs while pregnant, reports Talvi. South Carolina was also the first and
only state to test pregnant women for drug use and report the findings to
police without the woman's consent--or a warrant--until the US Supreme
Court put a stop to it.

McKnight, now 26, is the first to be imprisoned on a murder conviction
under the "viable fetuses" law. In October, McKnight lost what Talvi calls
her "best shot" at release when the Supreme Court declined to review her
case, "allowing the conviction to stand by default."

"What South Carolina has done, in effect, is (to make) pregnancy a crime
waiting to happen," Talvi quotes Lynn Paltrow, a lawyer and the executive
director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women in New York.

This, despite what Talvi says is the "absence of any scientific research
linking cocaine use to stillbirth." Nor did it matter that the state
"couldn't conclusively prove that McKnight's cocaine use actually caused
Mercedes' stillbirth. What mattered in the end, says Talvi, is that "South
Carolina prosecutors were hell bent on using McKnight as an example."

Paltrow was one of the lawyers who took McKnight's appeal to the high
tribunal, joining 27 other medical and drug-policy groups that sought to
overturn the conviction, including the American Public Health Association,
the American Nurses Association and the American Society of Addiction
Medicine. These organizations, says Talvi, saw McKnight's case as "an
extreme manifestation of an increasingly successful anti-choice agenda
wrapped in the cloak of the War on Drugs."

ALL over the United States, approximately 275 women have already faced
charges relating to drug use during their pregnancies, says Paltrow. "In a
country where a pregnant woman has no legal right to safe housing, daycare,
nutritious food, medical care or mental health services, it's horrifying to
witness the development of a law that allows for women's bodies to be
treated as if they were mere vessels," writes Talvi.

Talvi notes that the mothers have poor chances of winning public sympathy,
and that prosecutors "knew exactly how to demonize a 'drug mom.'" Judy
Appel of the Drug Policy Alliance, also points out that "women who are in
serious need of prenatal health care--and at most risk of having medical
problems--are even more reluctant to turn to a system that might press
charges if something goes wrong with their pregnancies."

The legal precedent set in the McKnight case is far graver than it might
seem at first, Talvi says. "As the laws have been written in South
Carolina, child abuse charges could as easily be applied to pregnant women
who smoke, drink even a moderate amount of alcohol, work around certain
kinds of chemicals or even change cat litter-in essence, any activity that
is 'within the realm of public knowledge' of causing potential harm to a
fetus."

MCKNIGHT'S case has since emboldened South Carolina to go after other
women, even retroactively. Prosecutors are going after their second murder
conviction under the "viable fetus" law, a woman by the name of Angelia
Kennedy who, like McKnight, is African-American, and who allegedly smoked
cocaine while pregnant, allegedly resulting in a stillbirth five years ago.

Right after the Supreme Court decision, Honolulu city prosecutors went
after Tayshea Aiwohi, 31, for the death of her two-day old son. She has
been charged with manslaughter for using crystal methamphetamine or "meth"
during her pregnancy. The Honolulu prosecutors deny any links to McKnight's
case, but declare that would now consider prosecutions of "meth moms" and
alcohol abusers, even when their babies survive.

Says Talvi: "Women like McKnight and Aiwohi are the victims of prosecutors
who have decided that they have the right to judge and punish women for
what happens to their bodies. It is a definitive step toward a government
that would have the power to tell us what constitutes acceptable pregnancy
and motherhood."