STATE NEEDS LAW DEFINING LIMITS DURING PREGNANCY

We have long known that women who smoke and drink and use illegal
drugs while they're pregnant can do serious harm to their babies. Now
we are beginning to understand that they can also harm their babies if
they eat too much or don't get enough of the right kinds of vitamins
and minerals.

So might we, one day, see women hauled into court on child abuse
charges because they spend nine months camping out at all-you-can-eat
buffets or skip their folic acid or ignore their doctors' advice?

It sounds far-fetched, and we certainly don't expect to see such
charges anytime soon, but our laws in South Carolina do nothing to
prohibit such prosecutions, should some solicitor determine that he
could convince a jury to convict. And that is a problem.

It might turn out to be good public policy to make it clearly illegal
for pregnant women to consume alcohol or cigarettes - or even make
other lifestyle choices that could damage their children. But here in
South Carolina, the only state in the nation where women can be
prosecuted because their babies are born with illegal drugs in their
blood, we've never had a debate about that. And we certainly don't
have any law setting forth what is and is not illegal.

In fact, we haven't even had a real debate about whether we want to
charge women with a crime for using drugs during pregnancy. Instead,
what we've had is a series of court rulings that looked into
established child abuse and child homicide laws and decided that there
was nothing to prevent those laws covering viable fetuses. And some
see last week's refusal by the U.S. Supreme Court to review our law as
a green light to prosecute more women under these theories.

There are good reasons for such prosecutions. Women who take actions
during their pregnancy that are known to harm children have done just
as much to damage those children as women who physically abuse them
after birth.

There also are good reasons to tread carefully. Beyond the fairness
question of the state's refusal to provide adequate drug treatment
facilities, there's a very real health dilemma. Threatening them with
prison time could scare some women away from seeking medical care at
all, possibly with much more serious consequences to their children
than even their drug use.

And there are good reasons to look at our overall policy. Illegal drug
use is an easy target: It's illegal to begin with, and the women who
abuse drugs during pregnancy (or at least the ones who get caught)
tend to be poor, and have little influence. But we know that alcohol
use during pregnancy does more long-term damage to children than
cocaine use. Cigarette use is harmful. Even overeating can doom a
child to a life of chronic diseases. And the list goes on. Does it
make sense to single out illegal drugs?

We're not entirely convinced that it does. But we don't know because
we haven't had an informed debate. All we've had is advocacy groups on
the two sides of the abortion issue screaming about how this affects
that debate, and thus needlessly complicating the issue. There are
some serious public health and public policy questions that need to be
addressed, so that we can decide as a state how we can best protect
children. It is shameful that in the seven years since our state
Supreme Court first dropped this issue in their laps, our legislators
have refused to address it.