IF YOU'RE AN ADDICT IT'S NOW A CRIME TO GIVE BIRTH
ELSHTAIN, JEAN BETHKE
Pregnancy Police If you're an addict it's now a crime to give birth BY JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN Katherine Jorgensen, head nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit at Boston City Hospital, tends...
...Is this kind of intervention state paternalism or maternalism...
...The problem is they are barely flickering...
...Pregnancy Police If you're an addict it's now a crime to give birth BY JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN Katherine Jorgensen, head nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit at Boston City Hospital, tends drug-addicted babies...
...A Detroit center that admits pregnant addicts reports that most hospitals prefer not to deal with such patients because they are "more likely than...
...It is also important to remember that some feminists have sought to shore up a "right to privacy" in certain circumstances, but have argued for limitations to such a right in other circumstances...
...In our reasonable concern for what's happening to the women, shouldn't we eke out a few tears for these babies...
...State welfare agencies in eight cities claim that nearly 9,000 babies were born last year in their city hospitals alone to mothers addicted to crack, according to a report in The New York Times...
...Is it antifeminist...
...Will we begin to see the emergence of state-designed and enforced pregnancy codes...
...Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Centennial Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University and a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board...
...And addicted babies are usually hyperactive, sometimes braindamaged, more likely to cry nonstop than normal infants...
...instead, it aims to shore up fragile social environments...
...Surely she is entitled to her anger and her concern and her near-desperation...
...One national women's-studies meeting sent out flyers urging participants to eschew deodorants, perfumes, hair sprays, and dry-cleaned clothes in the interests of creating a scent-free environIntervention that makes sense does not target individuals...
...Experts agree that addicted mothers and fathers are more likely to abuse or neglect their children because crack makes the addicts more susceptible to "all stresses in the environment...
...Even the Elenore Hutzel Recovery Center, which admits and treats with respect addicted, pregnant women, reports that "of 3,500 women who entered the Hutzel Center last year, only 577 completed treatment...
...Another Times story earlier this year quoted a bevy of experts who claimed that crack "can overwhelm one of the strongest forces in nature, the parental instinct...
...A rampant moralism is abroad in the land, and it is not limited to the Right...
...The modes of intervention that make sense are those that move not against, or even for, individuals but, instead, work to shore up ever more fragile social environments—families, neighborhoods, churches, support networks of all sorts...
...Sending women to jail is not the answer...
...Judy Howard, a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles, insists that unless courts order drug-addicted parents to bring their children in for care, the families won't bother...
...In the past few years, we have witnessed so much abuse of child-abuse charges that it takes no imagination at all to conjure up horrifying scenarios of excessive scrutinization and control of maternal or prenatal "behavior...
...One dominant motif of such feminist argumentation, for example, is that family life must be open to total scrutiny and that rapid justice should be meted out to those who are not behaving according to certain approved standards...
...More and more we are being left alone with our rights, or controlled in the name of someone else's rights...
...Whether scent cops would be posted at the door to deter the offensive offenders was not clear...
...Health-minded ecologists promoted "smoke-free" environments...
...She is angry that many of the addicted mothers genuinely love their babies and try hard to kick their habits even as others talk about drug deals in the nursery...
...A politics more attuned to helping people help not only themselves, but others is the direction we must move toward...
...Many of the kids are angry and abusive, and foster parents give them up in frustration or even terror...
...Those who are too desperate, or ill, or addicted to take such care will not be helped by punishment...
...Once this process begins, it is hard to say, "Yes, it is fine to talk about animal rights or gay rights, but we'll have none of fetal rights...
...The American Civil Liberties Union, quick to jump in on pregnant-addict cases, has been notoriously slow to move against speech restrictions and sexual-harassment codes so loosely drawn that even "unsolicited ogling" becomes a punishable offense...
...How does one treat this kind of story, culled from a special feature published by People magazine under the head Children in Peril...
...Though the estimate may be too high or too low, the most widely cited figure for drug-exposed babies born last year is 375,000, up 300 per cent from 1985...
...The answer, of course, is "Yes, but how...
...about 500 babies dependent on cocaine will be born at Boston City in one year...
...Kate Vandegrift, director of a residential rehabilitation program for mothers and children in Philadelphia, insists that the "maternal instinct gets blocked out because the only thing that matters is the addiction...
...I want to slug them," Jorgensen says...
...Or to end pornography...
...The point of all this is that punitive, disciplinary steps and moves toward the surveillance society are not the prerogative of just one end of the political spectrum...
...A recent piece sent out over the wires by the Gannett News Service speaks of orphaned "children of the living...
...The vast majority of women are going to tend to themselves during pregnancy because they care about the life they are nurturing...
...Punitive finger-shaking obviously does little good...
...Which is it...
...Will this, in turn, invite more intrusion and regulation of personal and familial life...
...I agree that the punitive approach is dangerous and ineffective...
...There are too many and they have too many problems for foster parents to cope with...
...In the meantime, desperate, addicted women are giving birth to children who won't have much of a chance and who are doomed to suffer, spending their first weeks and months on this Earth in a state of torment...
...Jorgensen is on the front line, dealing with the damage done to infants when mothers are addicted...
...The damage to babies, women, and wider communities goes on with no end in sight...
...Children often need relief from abusive or disordered home environments, but there are precious few alternatives...
...Now we even have calls for "scent-free" environments...
...It is getting more and more difficult to separate the "cures" from the "diseases" our political culture spawns and spreads...
...ment to protect the rights of those who suffer from allergies...
...In our present context, rights have been extended into all sorts of new areas and applied to all sorts of designated groups or activities...
...But in the next breath one finds an unequivocal call for total privacy—women's choice of sexual partners must not be "open for public scrutiny...
...Joyce Ladner, a feminist-oriented professor of social work at Howard University, calls neglected, abused, and drug-addicted children "orphans in our midst...
...Mandatory intervention is needed," she says, "to keep these kids visible, so we know they are not being abused or neglected...
...There is nothing at all wrong with President Bush's metaphor, "a thousand points of light...
...One cannot coherently push for an agenda that requires more and better surveillance and control on the one hand, and inviolable privacy on the other...
...It should surprise no one, then, that there is a move toward fetal protection and fetal rights, and that it sometimes extends to taking punitive action against pregnant addicts...
...Or to promote a world controlled in ways more favorable, so it was argued, to women...
...little urban nomads...
...I've thrown mothers out of here because they are visiting their babies high...
...Crack is the biggest problem...
...Calling in the police powers of the state to indict addicted mothers is but one symptom of a wider crusading mentality...
...The article details the collapse of America's foster-care system (never an ideal solution to the problem of kids without homes, in any case...
...According to Jorgensen, "crack babies" are now so common that the hospital may order toxicology tests if a woman delivers prematurely, as premature birth is more or less routine for pregnant addicts...
...Historically, child-neglect statutes created an opening wedge to let intrusive inspectors and social workers move against families simply because they were immigrant, poor, and working-class...
...Social policy should be designed with such alternatives in mind, and should bolster "mediating" networks instead of pitching children immediately into state receivership...
...Jorgensen is angry when she thinks of babies who shake so badly they rub their own limbs raw...
...This can create a terrible and volatile situation...
...We are in the midst of a moralistic frenzy, sustained by Right and Left alike...
...The individualist-contractualist obsessions of our politics lend themselves to a punitive/punishment scenario...
...On college campuses, liberals and the Left have led the way in adopting restrictive speech codes with punitive disciplinary action against offenders—and what counts as offensive is infinitely elastic...
...They are everywhere and their numbers are multiplying...
...And some feminists have made powerful arguments over the past few decades against a right to privacy that, they insist, shields abusive men and fathers from their just disciplinary deserts...
...The surveillance society has long been sought by some feminists to police and punish male behavior...
...the sons and daughters of divorce, drugs, home-lessness, and violence...
...The House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families found that more than 80 per cent of all child-abuse cases in the District of Columbia in 1989 involved substance abuse...
...other women" to give birth to premature infants, "born with multiple health problems, requiring costly care...
...Pregnant addicts are hard to treat, and they find it hard to get treatment...
...What if the intervention leads to the arrest and prosecution of drug-addicted mothers...
...But neither is adding yet another layer to an already debilitating and debilitated welfare bureaucracy...
...Many dropped out in the first week, often after one session...
...Government policy—and feminism, for that matter—should aim for helping support communities and sustaining families and enlivening informal helping networks...
Vol. 54 • December 1990 • No. 12
