Sterilization, Castration Proposed by Some : Courts Debate Ordering Life-Changing Surgery

Melody Baldwin poisoned her first child. Her second is on the way. Now the judge who controls her fate has proposed an unorthodox solution to her troubled life--sterilization.

The proposal has thrust the expectant mother into a thorny legal debate over crime and punishment and whether the courts are playing God or protecting society.

An outcry arose after Judge Roy Jones suggested that he might be more lenient if Baldwin were sterilized before he sentences her for feeding her 4-year-old son, Joshua, fatal doses of psychiatric drugs prescribed for her.

“She is a person who no longer needs to ever have any children,” Jones said. If she becomes a mother again, he warned, “the possibility is there for the same thing to happen.”

Baldwin, due to give birth late this month, has signed a consent form agreeing to sterilization, her attorney said. But the prospect of her trading motherhood for a reduced prison term has outraged civil libertarians, feminists and the county prosecutor, who all say Jones’ proposal would deny her a most fundamental right.

‘Close to Eugenics’

“I don’t think it’s appropriate for the court deciding who should have a child and who shouldn’t,” said Richard Waples, legal director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union. “You’re authorizing a decision on reproductive capabilities that is dangerously close to eugenics (a form of selective breeding). That’s something that is foreign to our system and beliefs about the sanctity of human life and the limited power of the state.”

“It reminds me of the Islamic punishment of cutting off a hand for theft,” said lawyer Pequita Buis, state legislative coordinator for the National Organization for Women. “We don’t engage in physical mutilation for punishment in this country.”

Jones insists that his proposal is not punitive or inconsistent with NOW tenets.

“They are the biggest advocates I am aware of how a woman should have the right to control her own body,” he said. “All I suggested to Baldwin is that she in fact think about that--do something to control her own body.”

Baldwin, who has told her attorney that she will surrender her baby for adoption, pleaded guilty in June to neglect of a dependent--giving her son drugs--after the state agreed to drop murder charges.

Shortly afterwards, Baldwin, then six months’ pregnant, was hospitalized for weight loss. She has since been moved to a psychiatric ward, awaiting the prospect of six to 20 years in prison.

Jones said if Baldwin rejects sterilization, it will not hurt her in court; if she agrees, he said, it could ease mental pressure and be a mitigating factor.

Her attorney, Michael Donahoe, said he does not think his client should become a mother again because she “doesn’t seem to be mentally, financially or legally in a position to raise a child in a responsible way.”

But Donahoe said he fears that if she is sterilized, “her already low self-esteem would be reduced almost to nothing.”

Intimate Aspects

The ethical and legal questions raised in this case have surfaced elsewhere where court rulings have touched on the most intimate aspects of life.

This month, an Arizona judge reversed her order requiring an 18-year-old mother to practice birth control throughout her childbearing years after she left two infant sons alone in a sweltering apartment for three days. The judge said the order was unenforceable because of the fallibility of birth control; the woman is pregnant again.

In 1985, three convicted rapists in South Carolina were resentenced after the state Supreme Court said a judge’s decision to let them choose castration over prison violated safeguards against cruel and unusual punishment.

And in Michigan in 1986, the state Supreme Court upheld a 5-to-15-year prison term imposed on Upjohn Co. heir Roger Gauntlett in place of the “chemical castration” originally levied after he pleaded no contest to raping a 14-year-old stepdaughter.

The chemical castration, part of a sentence that included a year in prison and four years’ probation, involved taking Depo-Provera, an experimental Upjohn drug used to reduce male sex drive.

Such debates aren’t new. In 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an Oklahoma law allowing sterilization of certain groups of felons, noting that “marriage and procreation are fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race . . . in evil or reckless hands it can cause races or types which are inimical to the dominant group to wither and disappear.”

And similar language is being used today.

“I don’t understand where any court in this country is qualified to tell people . . . who’s fit to breed and who isn’t,” said Garrett Simpson, an Arizona public defender representing the woman originally sentenced to birth control.

“It doesn’t take a huge jump from ‘Who can have children?’ to ‘Whose life is meaningful and whose isn’t?’ ” he said.

But others argue that alternative sentences can be effective.

“We have a very, very destructive system,” said Daniel Polsby, a Northwestern University law professor. “We send too many people down the river. We’ve got to be more creative. (If there are) people that you can handle in some other way, handle them in some other way.”

And although Polsby agreed with the need to protect rights, he said, “Twenty years of close confinement in a penitentiary is as serious a deprivation of civil liberties as you can imagine, short of being killed.”

That’s a good possibility for Baldwin, a 29-year-old unemployed waitress with a history of emotional problems and self-abuse.

Last summer, while awaiting trial, Baldwin injected urine in her breasts, a bizarre act Donahoe said stemmed from frustration and depression.

Baldwin’s behavior was scrutinized shortly after Joshua’s birth when medical workers noticed that the baby’s repeated coughing, vomiting and breathing difficulties occurred only when his mother was alone with him.

Donahoe said the boy was placed in a foster home but was returned to his mother several weeks later when suspicions of abuse could not be proven.

On Aug. 28, 1986, Joshua was hospitalized with a cough. Five days later, after improving steadily, he suddenly grew lethargic; he was in a coma by the next morning. On Sept. 5, life support was turned off.