Substance Abuse During Pregnancy
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The purpose of this research is to examine elements of the issue of substance abuse during pregnancy, with particular reference to California Assembly Bill 2187, introduced to the state's legislature on February 19, 1998, which took the form of an amendment to existing child-abuse laws. The plan of the research will be to set forth the salient points of the amendment and the social and cultural context in which the bill, which died in committee prior to being sent to the legislative floor for debate and vote into law, emerged in public discourse, and then to discuss various issue fronts of the controversy surrounding its introduction and debate, including the likely impact of the bill or others like it on public discourse, law-enforcement practices, and the families, particularly mothers and children, that it would affect.AB2187, which was cosponsored by six California state senators, provided for penalties associated with child abuse for pregnant women who might "willfully and knowingly ingest a controlled substance while in the 3rd trimester of pregnancy if the person thereafter gives birth to a live child who tests positive for that controlled substance" (AB2187, 1998, p. 1). Central to the conception of the bill was the fact that it was attached to California's penal Code. Accordingly, the bill identifies penalties for the offender, whose ingestion of the controlled substance is to be deemed an instance of abuse to the child's health, as follows:
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drugs or alcohol during their pregnancies should be subject to criminal sanctions" (Lisko, 1998). Lisko cites both proposed and enacted statutes regarding criminalization of fetus endangerment, notably a 1997 Tennessee law making knowing consumption of illegal drugs or harmful alcohol by a pregnant woman a misdemeanor child-abuse offense where a drug-addicted child is born. In Hawaii, a proposed bill creates a Class C felony for "consumption of alcohol or illegal drugs during pregnancy, once the woman knows of the pregnancy . . . for endangering the welfare of a minor" (Lisko, 1998). In South Carolina and Wisconsin, women have been charged with fetus endangerment on account of their ingestion of both legal (alcohol) and illegal (narcotics) substances.
The Law Center's Internet site goes into some detail about the arguments against criminalization of pregnant women's behavior, notably violation of constitutional rights to privacy and body integrity on one hand and the implication that a woman fearful of being detected in unlawful behavior might seek out an abortion (Lisko, 1998). There are also equal-protection issues raised pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment, for criminal prosecutions single out mothers while "not punishing fa
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2243
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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