Hard Labor

Charleston, S.C. — When Hurricane Hugo blasted the coast last September, LaVerne Singleton lost her home. A single mother of three children and pregnant with her fourth, she moved in with her sister and struggled to care for her family on $224 a month in welfare payments.

“It was crowded, and everyone was under a lot of stress,” she recalled. “I kept vomiting food — I just couldn’t keep anything down.”

On November 9, Singleton went into labor. She checked into the hospital at the Medical University of South Carolina, and several hours later she gave birth to a boy. He weighed 4 pounds and 11 ounces, and she named him Arneal.

The next day, while she was recovering from the delivery, the hospital called the police.

“They didn’t even wait until I was healed,” Singleton said. “I didn’t have any clothes on. I was sitting in a wheelchair with a sheet over it, and there was blood all over my hospital gown. A lady detective read the arrest form to me, and then handcuffed me and took me around the back of the hospital and put me into a cruiser. I had never been arrested before, and I was scared.

“They took me right to the jail. I got mug shots taken off me, and they took me into a sleazy cell. It was filthy there, very rough and nasty. My sister came to the jailhouse and brought me some clothes. But they would not let me see my baby. I cried many nights. When I finally did see him, he was one month old.”

Without knowing it, Singleton had become a target in a nationwide campaign to prosecute expectant mothers accused of using drugs during their pregnancy. Instead of offering care and treatment, some public hospitals are now turning patients over to the police, who take away the children and charge the mothers with “delivering drugs to a minor through the umbilical cord.”

According to court records, at least 45 women were arrested nationwide on such charges during the past year — 32 of them in the South. Texas, Georgia, and North and South Carolina have all arrested mothers on drug-related charges, and Florida has convicted two women and sent one to prison.

More of the arrests have occurred in South Carolina than in any other state. Both Charleston and Greenville, at opposite ends of South Carolina, have decided to crack down on “crack moms.” So far, the two cities have accused 18 mothers of passing cocaine to their children during pregnancy. All of the women are poor, and all but a few are black.

The wave of arrests has many health care advocates worried that officials are singling out poor black mothers for prosecution, punishing them for a medical condition for which many are unable to get treatment. They also fear that the “get tough” policies will deter poor women from seeking what little health care is available to them during pregnancy.

“This is not about drugs or protecting children,” said Efia Nwangaza, a Greenville attorney who represented a Georgia woman charged with child neglect after she tested positive for cocaine. “This is just another attempt to maintain control over women. It is a war against human rights under the guise of a war on drugs.”

 

Prenatal Police

The push to punish pregnant women who are addicted to drugs took an alarming turn last year when Jennifer Johnson, a 23-year-old black mother in Florida, became the first woman in the nation convicted of pushing drugs to her newborn child.

A slim, bespectacled woman, Johnson had given birth to two children with cocaine in their blood streams and was pregnant with a third. Unemployed, often forced to live on the streets of Altamonte Springs, she sometimes smoked crack as often as four times a day.

She was addicted — but she was also concerned about her unborn child. On December 22, 1988, she called an ambulance. “I thought that if I tell ’em I use drugs they would send me to a drug place or something,” she said. “I really didn’t have nowhere to stay. I just wanted to get some help.”

But instead of offering Johnson treatment for her addiction, officials turned her plea for help against her. After she gave birth, she was arrested and charged with being a drug pusher — a felony punishable by 30 years in prison.

Prosecutors wanted to make Johnson a test case, but they had a small problem. Because Florida law does not recognize a fetus as a person, there was legally no one to whom Johnson could have passed the drugs. To get around this dilemma, prosecutors simply stretched the meaning of the state drug trafficking law. They argued that Johnson “delivered” cocaine to her baby through the umbilical cord during the seconds after it was born, but before the cord was cut.

The court agreed, and Johnson was convicted on July 13 last year. She was sentenced to 15 years probation and ordered to perform 200 hours of community service. She was also forbidden to go to any bars or to associate with anyone who uses drugs or alcohol — for 15 years.

“We need to ensure that this woman does not give birth to another cocaine baby,” Prosecutor Jeff Dean said. “The message is that this community cannot afford to have two or three cocaine babies from the same person.”

Lynn Paltrow, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, heard a different message. “These cases lead to a prenatal police state,” she said. “They are punishing a woman for a non-existent crime, controlling her for 15 years of life for misbehaving during pregnancy.”

 

“Brown Cars”

The conviction of Jennifer Johnson impressed law enforcement officials across the country. In Charleston, doctors at Medical University of South Carolina had been noticing a dramatic rise in the number of “cocaine mothers.” When they referred the women to a drug treatment program, most never showed up.

“We were doing everything we could to teach that ‘this is bad — cut it out,’ but we weren’t getting anywhere,” said Dr. Ed Horger, professor of obstetrics and gynecology. “So we met with police and the solicitor and decided to put some teeth in the counseling procedures.”

Officials agreed that any pregnant woman coming into the hospital who had received “incomplete prenatal care” would be tested for drugs. Any woman who turned up positive would be shown a video about how drugs could harm her fetus, referred to a drug treatment program, and forced to sign a form acknowledging that she would be arrested if she missed her counseling appointments.

“When we put the teeth in it or said you gotta show up or you’re subject to arrest, it worked beautifully,” Dr. Horger said. “The month before we started this program, there were 25 positive drug screens. Since then, there have been only two or three a month.”

Horger discounted objections to putting patients behind bars. “I don’t see the program as wrong,” he said. ‘The mother is in the wrong. My proper role is to take care of the fetus, because no one else is sticking up for it. The baby’s rights are being violated every time the momma uses cocaine. The only reason for any arrest is to get mother away from street drugs, to force her into proper care.”

But such concern strikes some as less than genuine. Like most hospitals, the Medical University offers no drug treatment program for pregnant women or their infants. Although national studies indicate that one of every nine babies has been exposed to illegal drugs in the womb, a congressional committee found that only 50 of the 5,000 drug treatment programs it surveyed offer care to expectant mothers.

One of the first pregnant women arrested in Charleston was Monica Young, a 19-year-old black mother who tested positive for cocaine during a hospital stay last year. When she was released on October 4, she was met by three uniformed officers and taken to the county jail. Bond was set at $75,000 — a figure out of reach for an unemployed teenager on welfare.

Young sat in jail for six weeks before her bond was reduced to $5,000. Her family used federal emergency relief money they had received after Hurricane Hugo to get her out, but she was placed under house arrest and forbidden to leave her home until she gave birth.

A week before Christmas, Young delivered her child. It was healthy, and showed no signs of drug dependency.

When the case came before Judge Brian Rawl, he ruled there was no evidence that Young had delivered cocaine to a minor and dismissed the charges. “The solicitor didn’t produce any drugs, and they didn’t even test the child,” he said.

Rawl also said the case raised the issue of whether poor black women are being singled out for prosecution. “I don’t personally feel that everybody is being turned in — it’s only the indigent patients,” he said. “It’s kind of like inspecting traffic on the highway. You can stop every car or every fourth car, but you can’t just stop brown cars or cars with female drivers. You can’t be selective — it has to be all or none.”

Patricia Kennedy, a lawyer who volunteered to represent Young, also expressed outrage at the arrest policy. “In these cases, rehabilitation should be addressed first,” she said. “These folks need help and their babies need protection — but there are better ways to do it than using our jails as laying-in rooms for pregnant women.”

 

Stool Pigeons

Monica Young got out of jail before she gave birth to her baby — but another Charleston mother was not so lucky. She was arrested at Medical University hospital after she tested positive for cocaine and was kept in jail under a $75,000 bond until she gave birth.

“If you had set bond at $100 for this lady, she couldn’t have got out of jail,” said Michael O’Connell, the public defender. “She kept bleeding and having minor contractions, and she was in jail three weeks before she gave birth. I think they were treading on thin ice when they put a woman in such an advanced state of pregnancy in jail. In this case it worked out, but everybody was lucky that nothing really tragic happened.”

Charles Condon, the Charleston solicitor who is prosecuting pregnant women, denied that the policy discriminates against the poor. “We’re not really interested in convicting women and sending them to jail,” he said. “We’re just interested in getting them to stop using drugs before they do something horrible to their babies.”

But others fear that arresting pregnant women will have horrible consequences for newborn babies. If mothers with drug problems see doctors and other caretakers acting like stool pigeons, they may be less likely to seek prenatal care.

“I think you’re putting people in a position where they’re scared to go to a doctor for medical care,” said Bobby Howe, an attorney who represented one of the women arrested in Charleston. “This is a medical problem, not a legal problem. These people need counseling, not jail time.”

There is already some evidence that the South Carolina crackdown is scaring away pregnant women who need medical attention. According to a preliminary investigation conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union, more women in Charleston are waiting until the last minute to seek medical care — or are giving birth in taxis or bathrooms without any medical supervision.

“I just think it’s the wrong message to be sending out that if you’re on drugs and you come into the Medical University to get prenatal care, you’re going to be arrested,” said Michael O’Connell, the public defender. “Any desire women have to get prenatal care is obviously going to be squelched by the knowledge that they may go to jail.”

According to drug counselors, arresting women with drug problems also makes them resistant to treatment. “It was really disturbing for the mothers we saw, to say the least,” said Dale Duncan, director of adult outpatient treatment at the county substance abuse center. “All of a sudden they not only have a drug problem — now they have a legal problem. They’re arrested, fingerprinted, put in jail. It made them hostile to the system, and made it hard for them to focus on treatment.”

LaVerne Singleton, the mother arrested the day after she gave birth, said treatment taught her “that there are other alternatives to drugs. But I didn’t have the time or money to go back and forth to all those classes, to show up in court, to meet with the social workers. I have kids at home, and I didn’t want to leave them alone — I might get charged with neglect again.”

Singleton said she would not have agreed to a urine test if she had known the hospital was going to turn her over to the police. “Nobody gave me a choice,” she said. “It was just thrown at me blindly. I never had a chance to decide. You are supposed to have your own privacy — that’s our freedom. But they didn’t allow that for me. If they really want to help women on drugs, they need to tell them to get help, not just lock them up.”

Many of those fighting to protect single mothers like Singleton say they fear the arrests may be the first step in a larger campaign against the reproductive rights of women.

“This is being directed toward the weakest and most vulnerable people in our society,” said Efia Nwangaza, the Greenville attorney. “That is exactly how fascism rose in Italy and Germany. Everybody else thinks, ‘It’s not me, it’s those people — women, the poor.’ Unless those of us who recognize it do something about it, this is just going to continue undaunted.”