Weblog
03/21/01 05:57 PM: I was listening to CNN’s
I was listening to CNN’s Talkback Live today while I was making dinner. I don’t really care for the show much. It seems too much like Oprah to me. But the topic was pretty interesting today. They were discussing today’s Supreme Court ruling that public hospitals can’t drug-test pregnant women and hand the results over to police without their consent. This had been going on in South Carolina, apparently. I have the admit that the program was well-intentioned. It was designed to protect babies from being born with drug dependencies, an awful occurrence. But the plan was not well thought out. Basically, if a pregnant woman tested positive for drug use, she could then be arrested for child abuse and carted off to jail, which actually happened. I wholeheartedly agree that taking drugs during pregnancy is a form of child abuse, but throwing the mother in jail is not the answer. Sure, the child will benefit in that it will not be exposed to any more drugs while the mother is incarcerated. But jail is not a place for rehabilitation. The child will either be taken away, or it will still have a drug-abusing mother once she is released from jail. Is it not worth the attempt to try and help the mother so that the child might live something resembling a normal life?
That’s enough to convince me that the Supreme Court (at least Stevens, O’Connor, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kennedy) made the right decision. But there was actually a much larger issue at stake. Do we really want to turn medical personnel into narcs? I’m not entirely adverse to the idea of testing pregnant women for drug use
