Since the 1980s, the Medical University Hospital of Charleston, S.C. has been screening pregnant women for cocaine use.
The program primarily affected poor black women who sought medical attention at the tax-funded hospital.
Now, 10 women who were subjected to such testing have filed suit, contending the policy violated their constitutional protection against unreasonable searches. And the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear their case.
A lower court had ruled the practice constitutional, since it served "special government needs." But one can search the Bill of Rights in vain for the exemption: "except for special government needs." What's more, as attorneys for the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy noted in their court filings, "nearly every application of the criminal law serves some health or safety purpose." Is that the Bill of Rights, circling slowly clockwise down the drain?
In fact, what we have here is further evidence why the government should not be involved in dispensing or funding medical care, at all. The temptation for bureaucrats to use the awesome leverage which doctors hold over sick people to work the government's will often proves overwhelming. (After all, just think of all the "good" we can do!)
When the Social Security Ponzi scheme was introduced in the 1930s, the American people were assured this income transfer scheme disguised as an "old-age annuity" would always remain "voluntary, by application only," that the SS number would never become a "national ID number," already familiar from sundry European police states.
But try to escape a hospital maternity ward with a newborn child these days (start ital)without(end ital) having that child assigned a federal number, all for the convenience of the taxmen.
The claim that it's "to protect the children" will always be rolled out. But what really better serves an infant just coming into the world -- to allow his or her mother to seek prenatal care without fear of arrest, or to establish a system which makes it far more likely the child will be born in a dank closet or basement, without medical attention, by a young woman terrified of being arrested shortly after the first nurse shows up with the urine sample bottle?
Now, some might argue the average mother-to-be is better served by a midwife and a home birth in the first place, avoiding toxic eyedrops and pertussis vaccines and government numbering and all the rest. But even responsible midwives agree it's nice to have a hospital's facilities in easy reach in case of complications.
Is it really our goal to keep pregnant young women away from medical care? Then why not station INS officers in our hospital emergency rooms as well, demanding green cards as a condition of treatment? That should thin out the crowd a bit. So what if some Brazilian tourist dies out on the lawn?
The South Carolina case will also focus attention, convenient or not, on the asserted belief of local prosecutors that a fetus after the 24th week of pregnancy is a "person" under South Carolina law, and that a pregnant woman consuming cocaine should thus also be charged with "distributing a controlled substance to a minor."
What an interesting idea. Shall women also be charged with a felony for consuming alcohol while pregnant?
Of course, pregnant women should be discouraged from consuming any such drugs. But where will this road lead? Does a woman really lose her constitutional rights as soon as she's visibly pregnant? Shall the bureaucrats now be empowered to bind uncooperative pregnant women hand and foot and sling them in hammocks, force-feeding them through funnels until they bear us our new little wards of the state?
The solution is simple. Ethical medical practice treats voluntary patients for their complaints. (If the patient doesn't feel her consumption of intoxicants is a problem, then medical advice should be limited to just that -- advice, the same way a doctor might urge a patient to stop smoking legal tobacco.) Ethical medical practice (start ital)never(end ital) imposes unsolicited and unwanted medical procedures at the behest of the state, nor willingly takes advantage of a person's medical needs to help identify him or her to authorities anxious to treat his or her medical condition as a "crime."
Period.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at $24.95 postpaid from Mountain Media, P.O. Box 271122, Las Vegas, Nev. 89127; by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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