CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS/GOVERNOR : Rivals Outline Proposals on AIDS, Drug Abuse : Wilson: Republican candidate advocates taking newborns from addicted mothers who refuse to submit to rehabilitation.

Advocating an increased effort to break the cycle of drug abuse, Sen. Pete Wilson on Thursday called for a massive, government-financed drug rehabilitation program for all pregnant addicts, and said that mothers who refuse to submit to such treatment should lose custody of their newborns.

“Rehabilitation is very expensive. It is by no means a certain process,” Wilson said, adding that he nonetheless saw a need for mandatory, residential treatment.

“If we do not do this and we simply allow the crack epidemic to spread, you are facing hellish problems.”

The Republican gubernatorial nominee said he did not know how much such a program would cost, but said the cost should be borne by the federal government. Pressed as to how that could be done given the massive federal deficit, he said, “We are going to have to spend money in order to contain and reverse what has become an epidemic.

“If a woman has given birth to an addicted newborn, I think that we have no choice . . . but to say, ‘You can take the child after a while (but) first you are going to go into the home and get clean enough.’ ”

According to figures supplied by the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, such a program would not only involve tens of thousands of mothers and infants across the state, but also cost tens of millions of dollars, or more, to finance.

In Los Angeles County alone, officials estimate that about 11% of the roughly 186,000 infants born annually have drugs or alcohol in their systems, said Rene Topalian, assistant director for drug abuse for the county Department of Health Services.

The state Department of Health Services estimated recently that 2% to 5% of newborns in fiscal year 1987-88 had evidence of illegal drugs in their systems. Those are the most recent figures available.

Topalian estimated that as many as 1,000 pregnant women are now treated annually in county drug centers. Costs for treatment can run from $2,000 per year for outpatient programs to $25,000 per year for residential programs, he said.

The county Department of Children’s Services has the legal authority to take drug-addicted newborns from their parents, and does so in about 200 cases per month after a thorough assessment, said Ray LaMotte, the department’s director of public affairs. LaMotte would not say what percentage of addicted newborns that represented, but other statistics suggested it was small.

At present, Topalian said, there is no place to put drug-addicted babies.

“It’s somewhat unrealistic to make the assumption that there is enough foster care or other services to automatically take an alcohol- or drug-exposed infant out of the custody of the mother, and the cost of doing that is so enormous that it may not be acceptable to the taxpaying public,” he said.

In practice, the Los Angeles County official said, county workers try to attract the mothers to some form of drug treatment and parenting classes.

In a breakfast meeting with political reporters in Los Angeles, Wilson said he was “not insensitive” to the rehabilitation needs of male addicts, but said pregnant women were a priority.

“Young men don’t get pregnant,” he said.

The discussion about treatment of pregnant addicts came as Wilson again forwarded his proposal to broaden the availability of free prenatal care in California to those women not already covered either by private insurance or Medi-Cal.

Wilson has suggested that the program be paid for through money collected by the state’s tobacco tax. That money now goes to a variety of programs, including the funding of trauma centers and other medical programs.

The senator argued that spending roughly $1,750 per woman for prenatal care would cut back premature births and other complications that can prove to be extremely expensive to treat. He acknowledged that the shift in priorities would mean that some current medical programs would not receive state money.

“We can’t spend money on everything,” he said. “We are going to have to make hard decisions. . . . This is far and away the most prudent as well as the most humane.”

During the breakfast, Wilson expressed frustration at what he said was the state’s present course of reacting to rather than preventing health problems.

“I am going to be an activist governor,” said Wilson, who added that he hoped he would be remembered as being “successful in, overall, bringing a marked change to the way problems are dealt with.”