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The fight for reproductive rights: hard-won protections for reproductive freedom are increasingly under attack, says this advocate for pregnant women. She fights back in the courts.

Article Excerpt
Thirty years after Roe v. Wade, Lynn Paltrow--executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) in New York City--believes that women still face an array of limitations on their reproductive decision-making, including health and welfare policies that can undermine motherhood, especially for low-income and minority women.

Her work focuses on how efforts to expand fetal rights and the war on drugs intersect as well as on dangerous legal precedents for the health and well-being of women and families in general. Fetal rights advocates, Paltrow says, have fought hard to convince police, prosecutors, and judges that applying child abuse laws to fetuses deters drug use by pregnant women. She strongly advocates treating drug use during pregnancy as a public health issue rather than a crime, arguing that the threat of criminal prosecution only serves to scare pregnant women away from necessary health care.

In this interview with TRIAL Associate Editor Christian Harlan Moen, Paltrow discusses some of the legal issues that she has encountered in the ongoing fight to protect reproductive rights.

Is the main focus of your work today protecting the rights of drug-addicted pregnant women?

We are really interested in expanding reproductive rights and achieving drug-policy reform. It is often in the defense of drug-using pregnant women that we are best able to address a confluence of assaults on women's and children's rights and human dignity.

The prosecution of pregnant, drug using women reflects an intersection of the war on drugs and the war on abortion--and often very clear racial discrimination. And it is by attacking women who are particularly unpopular and particularly defenseless that drug-war proponents and anti-choice activists can simultaneously undermine women's reproductive rights and family well-being, advance the war on drugs to women's wombs, and put into place vague laws open to racially discriminatory application.

In March 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Ferguson v. City of Charleston, which held that when hospital staff tested pregnant women for evidence of cocaine use, they had been acting as an arm of law enforcement, conducting searches for criminal justice purposes in violation of the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unwarranted searches and seizures. (121 S. Ct. 1281 (2001).) Could you explain the background of the case?

In 1989, a doctor and a nurse at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) started selective urine screening of pregnant women for drugs--possibly reacting to claims of a serious problem with cocaine use and harm to children, although there was virtually no research at the time to determine whether in fact prenatal exposure to cocaine was particularly harmful. Then the nurse heard a news story about police in Greenville, North Carolina, arresting cocaine-using pregnant women on the theory...

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