Alcohol on Trial : A First-of-Its-Kind Case Looks at Who Should Pay Price for Mother’s Drinking

Harold Thorp, a short, stout 66-year-old alcoholic, fought a losing battle with tears on the witness stand when asked recently: Would he have let his pregnant wife drink as much as a half a fifth of Jim Beam bourbon daily, if he had known that alcohol consumption during pregnancy has been linked to birth defects?

“No, there would have been no drinking at my home,” he replied. “How could anyone deliberately destroy their own loved one? That’s an asinine idea.

Longed for a Child

“I wanted this baby--I loved this baby. You’d be killing your youngster. Absolutely not, there wouldn’t have been a drop in my house,” said the graying, bespectacled man, his words forceful but punctuated with choked tears.

After a 25-year, childless marriage to another woman, Thorp had longed for a child so much that he had asked Candance (Candy) Pedersen--a 34-year-old alcoholic and mother of two--to bear him a child just one month after meeting her in a bar in February, 1984. She agreed and got pregnant almost immediately.

But almost two years after Michael Thorp was born on Dec. 28, 1984, physicians told the couple that their boy, who has deformities and mild retardation, had suffered Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. They were told it was caused by Candy’s drinking during her pregnancy of up to half a fifth of bourbon a day, bouts of consumption in which she sometimes drank herself unconscious. The Thorps now claim they were shocked and surprised by the diagnosis because they had never heard that alcohol could harm an unborn child.

In November, 1987, they filed a potentially precedent-setting lawsuit against the James B. Beam Distillery seeking lifetime support for their son.

In their suit, the Thorps have asserted that Beam has known for years about Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and should have labeled its products with a warning to pregnant women of potential harmful effects.

The distiller, refusing to acknowledge a link between alcohol and birth defects, has countered that no warning would dissuade an alcoholic from drinking its product.

The Thorp case, which began April 24 and is expected to take three to four weeks to present, is the first such case of its kind in the nation, according to experts, some of whom have likened it to landmark litigation seeking to hold tobacco manufacturers liable for harm from use of their products.

But two other almost identical alcohol cases soon will follow: one will be heard later this month in Olympia, Wash.; another is scheduled in federal district court in Seattle early next year.

It is no surprise that Washington state has become the center of this sweeping new concern about American women and alcoholic beverage manufacturers.

The University of Washington is where a team of doctors in 1973 identified the link between alcohol use and birth defects, an affliction they labeled Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, the most serious manifestation of what can happen when mothers drink, though researchers estimate that 40,000 American babies each year suffer some damage from their mother’s alcohol use.

The university also is where lawyers turned to researchers when they were seeking potential clients for damage suits aimed at addressing the harm that is believed to be caused by the syndrome.

That the Thorps might be unlikely plaintiffs for a pathfinding case does not trouble many of the people interested in their suit. Instead, they assert that what happened to the couple should be a lesson to all women of child-bearing age.

Because the matter now is in court, the Thorps, their attorneys and the distiller’s lawyers have declined to comment on the case. But thousands of pages of court documents draw a stark picture of the sad lives of an alcoholic couple and their child, who now requires speech, occupational and physical therapy.

From the time Candance Thorp can remember, her mother and father regularly drank alcohol, she said in the sworn statements.

Her father, she noted, often beat her two brothers after a night of drinking.

Her mother usually drank Jim Beam with 7-Up--the first drink that Candy would stir for herself at age 22. It was the mix she stuck with for 17 years, though she eventually substituted water for the soda.

“At times it got heavier, at times it lightened up,” Candy said of her drinking.

A short, heavyset woman with wavy light brown hair that hangs just past her shoulders, she has been married three times.

Her first husband was Bob Ashcroft, a serviceman with whom she had her first child, Terri, in 1969. She later divorced Ashcroft and married David Pedersen, a wood products salesman.

Though her daughter Terri ended up living with her father, Pedersen supported Rebecca, the second daughter Candy had in 1979 with a man she has refused to name; she put the surname Lohse on the girl’s birth certificate because “we had been dating and he said if I wanted to use his last name, I could,” she said in her sworn statement.

Candy has claimed that Pedersen, though he did support her child, was an abusive man who traveled often and left her and Rebecca alone in their Seattle-area trailer home.

Connie Peare, Candy’s sister, recalled stopping by that trailer one night in 1983. In a sworn statement, she said she found that “my sister had been beaten and the trailer was filthy. It was obvious that my sister had been drinking heavily and her daughter was not taken care of, and because the situation was so bad, I took them home with me.”

Had Few Friends

Candy, who had few friends except for a flight attendant whom her sister could not identify, had nowhere else to go.

The next day, though, she did leave for alcohol treatment at Puget Sound Hospital. Rebecca remained with Peare, who later adopted her.

After Candy’s treatment ended, she moved back to Peare’s. But Peare soon found beer bottles under Candy’s bed and was told her sister would do better on her own. So Peare drove her to New Beginnings, a Seattle women’s shelter.

Candy soon disappeared from there. No one knew where she was for six months in 1983, although Peare said she believes her sister lived on the streets of Seattle until she ended up toward the year’s end at the city’s Harborview Hospital detoxification ward.

Soon afterward, on Feb. 3, 1984, Candy met Harold Thorp.

They struck up a conversation “in a little tavern where I was having a beer or two,” he recalled in a sworn statement. “We had a couple of beers and I asked her if she’d like to go out, and she lived down the street a ways, and she was in slippers. She said she had to go home and get shoes.

“So I thought, ‘Well, goodby.’ Pretty soon she come back and she’s pretty cute, and then we took off and went up to the Hideaway and started in on our favorite whiskey, ended up in a motel with a jug of Jim Beam, and that’s how we got acquainted.”

They continued for a week or two, with Candy meeting Harold at the bar after his day as an iron welder ended around 4 p.m.

“Then,” he recalled, “I talked her into coming home with me and moved her out of the apartment and in with me.”

Their small green house, surrounded by an unkempt yard filled with long crabgrass and encircled by a chicken-wire fence, is in a poor area of south Seattle, which borders a light-industrial zone.

Into a Routine

Inside that home, the Thorps, they have testified, fell into a routine during and past March, when Candy conceived their son: He would get home, they would buy a fifth or half-gallon jug of Jim Beam, then they would drink while watching television.

Harold Thorp once helped Candy by paying for a home divorce kit. And after she was divorced from Pedersen, she married Thorp on July 3, 1984.

In June, Candy said she had taken a home pregnancy test and had tested positive. But neither she nor Harold thought much about their drinking.

Of the booze, he said in a sworn statement: “It just went, you know. Sometimes several fifths a week, other times maybe a fifth and a pint or two, another time maybe a couple of fifths and a half-gallon.”

Candy’s recollection: “Some days it was two, three drinks, some days it was nothing, other days it might be two or three drinks and then we would pick up a fifth of Jim Beam and take it home, at which time we would split it.”

When Michael was born in December, the Thorps had no reason to suspect anything was wrong.

Their drinking continued, although Candy did enter another alcohol treatment center in December, 1985, after nearly killing herself by ingesting rubbing alcohol.

But by early 1986, she again had lapsed into drinking and was so badly neglecting her son that her relatives called authorities to have him placed in foster care, according to court documents.

Between February 1986 and July 1986, while Michael was in foster care, he was taken to the University of Washington. There, Dr. Sterling Clarren diagnosed him as having Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.

‘Shocked, Upset, Disturbed’

“We were shocked, upset, disturbed” when told, said Candy, who insists that she never had heard of any link between alcohol and birth defects.

“We did not realize something was wrong until he was diagnosed. . . .” she has said, though the defense lawyers in her case have noted several of the alcohol abuse programs Candy attended dispense such information to every female patient.

Since her son’s condition was identified, it has become obvious that he is hyperactive, Candy has said. Michael has an extremely short attention span and poor coordination. He has a small head and nose, thin lips, a lack of indentation above his lips and some degree of mental retardation, doctors say.

These deformities can be blamed on Candy’s drinking of Jim Beam bourbon during her pregnancy, according to the couple’s suit.

But Barry M. Berish, Beam’s chairman, has replied in his sworn statements that virtually nothing could convince him that a link exists between alcohol consumption by a pregnant woman and birth defects in her child. Further, defense attorneys have argued, Michael’s problems may have other causes, such as heredity and malnutrition.

In its court documents, Beam also asserts that a warning label on a bottle would do nothing to deter an alcoholic from drinking.

But Susan Galbraith of the National Council on Alcoholism disagreed, saying that she has heard “over and over” from alcoholic women with whom she has worked that they quit drinking while pregnant because they were “aware of the relationship between drinking and birth defects.”

‘We’ve Known the Role’

Her group is “very supportive” of the Thorps in their litigation because “it’s about time the alcoholic beverage industry is held accountable for producing and selling a product that causes major birth defects,” she said. “We’ve known the role of alcohol in birth defects for more than a decade and this industry has continued to not warn women. This will force some kind of accountability on this industry.”

Though Candy--an alcoholic who abused hard liquor during pregnancy--may seem a less-than-ideal plaintiff, Galbraith doesn’t believe that will dilute the message she and others desperately want to get across.

But Dr. Herman Samson, director of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute at the University of Washington, sees dangers.

“This case is getting sensationalized and I’m worried that the real message will get lost,” he said, arguing that many women will look at Candy and say, “I’m not an alcoholic--I’m not like her.”

That so potentially important a case has such seemingly imperfect plaintiffs like the Thorps can be easily explained, because the lawyers probably had a hard time finding people willing to air their problems in public, he said.

He noted, for example, that some parents whose children suffer the syndrome do not get to keep custody of their youngsters. Some parents with histories of substance abuse also have faced criminal prosecution.

“Certain individuals in California have been tried for taking drugs while pregnant,” he said. “I suppose there’s some question of risk here, if someone wanted to sue a plaintiff for abusing their child in utero in the same way. The people that are (pursuing lawsuits) are the ones that decided, win or lose, it was important to them to bring this to attention.”

More and more, states have begun to take their own steps to try to educate women about potential links between alcohol and birth defects.

In Washington, where this has been a priority for university researchers, Gov. Booth Gardner recently announced that his state soon will start a yearlong media campaign to tell women that drinking while pregnant can be risky to their unborn children. Joining six other states, including California, Washington also soon will require restaurant, retail store and tavern posters warning of the dangers of alcohol to pregnant women.

Through such measures--combined with a law that was passed last year by Congress and that takes effect in November requiring alcoholic beverages to carry warning labels--officials hope progress will be made in reducing cases of birth defects potentially linked to alcohol.

For Samson and other University of Washington researchers, the Thorp case is a matter for close attention. They will not discuss it specifically because of their involvement with it. But they make clear that they have been disheartened that it has taken so long for public attention to focus on the import of their 1973 findings on alcohol and pregnancy.

“The fact that this trial is bringing national attention to the issue is good,” noted Samson. “But to cheer for either side is a mistake because everyone is a loser. We hope, at least, that some people will benefit from this so people will understand what this means: We have a preventable birth defect and it’s a shame we aren’t doing more to prevent it.”