Should CPS be allowed to intervene if a woman tests positive for drugs before birth?

I was thinking in the same line as this. Getting those laws passed would
be just as difficult as anything else though.

The argument:
"If the mother is addicted to Alcohol/Meth and using often while pregnant, don't you think the mother could cause equal harm to the baby (stress, withdraws, so on) while being put inside a locked up room or in solitary during pregnancy? Pregnancy is already extremely stressful on a woman's body to begin with and this would just add to the problem."

Then it would be:

"The drugs/drinking are worse for the baby than the stress but every body is different so who is to say who is right?" Then you are left with the situation if the Mom is over stressed, or mentally weak she could die during birth and then the child has no mom.

There are many more arguments that could be made, but I would suggest mandatory drug tests during pregnancy (if not already) and if you fail then you have 3 options as Sweet Lou suggested with Rehab being the best option under 24 hour surveillance. But who would pay for this? Tax payers or the mother?

What would the legal trouble consist of? Putting the mom in jail after the kid is born? Fined X amount of money which will restrict the family from having money to support the child? There are so many questions with no answers and every side has a different view on things.

Good debatable scenario.

 

Well placed concern, but I think too many snags.

First, are they really drug testing all pregnant women? That seems a colossal waste of time/money in the current system where a positive test means basically very little, not to even consider the privacy concerns. Guilty until proven innocent more and more in this country. Well placed concern, but ....

Second, which, how much, how often, quantify damage.... so much interpretation... and the stakes are high.

Third, suggested or imposed abortions or adoption? How about suggested / imposed treatment first?

Yeah, right, get a positive version of all that passed and funded in today's political climate.

 

This is a thorny issue. There may be something more recent (circa 2000) but SC says there has to be consent or search warrant...

Ferguson v. Charleston

"Held: A state hospital’s performance of a diagnostic test to obtain evidence of a patient’s criminal conduct for law enforcement purposes is an unreasonable search if the patient has not consented to the procedure. The interest in using the threat of criminal sanctions to deter pregnant women from using cocaine cannot justify a departure from the general rule that an official nonconsensual search is unconstitutional if not authorized by a valid warrant. Pp. 8—18."

Scalia's dissent:

“But as far as the Fourth Amendment is concerned: There was no unconsented search in this case. And if there was, it would have been validated by the special-needs doctrine. For these reasons, I respectfully dissent.”

Unless this decision has been modified in some manner, my guess is that hospitals are getting consent prior to testing. If I'm a pregnant woman using drugs, the thought of jail may preclude me from seeking prenatal care. That is not a good choice either.

Good discussions of the issue can be found here and here and here and here.

EDIT: I voted yes, but then the debate shifts to what intervention is appropriate.

 

All of this is hypothetical moral question right? Because the hardcore pro-choice crowd would never allow any of it, as is. The moderates would be scared the legal justification would be endangering a child and open up new arguments on when human life starts.

You are up the creek anyways because it seems hard to justify regulating what happens to a possible human life.

 

This 25 year federal study answering the following question is relevant to the issue:

Did cocaine harm the long-term development of children like Jaimee, who were exposed to the drug in their mother's womb?

The researchers had expected the answer would be a resounding yes. But it wasn't. Another factor would prove far more critical.

A lot of the "interventionism" was propelled by the crack explosion of the '80s. Poverty is much more of a problem...duh


EDIT: to provide more excerpted info for those who don't want to click to the original study.

The years of tracking kids have led Hurt to a conclusion she didn't see coming.

"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture.

Other researchers also couldn't find any devastating effects from cocaine exposure in the womb. Claire Coles, a psychiatry professor at Emory University, has been tracking a group of low-income Atlanta children. Her work has found that cocaine exposure does not seem to affect children's overall cognition and school performance, but some evidence suggests that these children are less able to regulate their reactions to stressful stimuli, which could affect learning and emotional health.

Coles said her research had found nothing to back up predictions that cocaine-exposed babies were doomed for life. "As a society we say, 'Cocaine is bad and therefore it must cause damage to babies,' " Coles said. "When you have a myth, it tends to linger for a long time."