A Coroner’s-Eye View of ‘Drug Babies’

Dr. Joseph Halka, suited up in his blue apron, his hands and arms sheathed in plastic, has little time to waste.

He is a forensic pathologist, one of four at the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner’s Department. Bodies await him in the morgue just down the hall. A dead fetus will arrive soon.

Halka is done preaching, done trying to educate the ignorant, the willfully uninformed, the ones who couldn’t care less. Having seen so much over the past 22 years, he says it is probably fatalism that infuses him now.

“I suppose it’s the human wastage that disturbs me,” he says. “We are very callous about the way we use drugs. . . . I don’t know how much we can expect with education. We’ve tried everything. Society has to change.”

And from this outpost, it seems that society keeps changing for the worse.

Pregnant women are poisoning--and killing--their babies with drugs. It is happening more than ever before.

The official statistics list such deaths as “accidental” or “natural,” even when everybody knows they are not. There is no place on a fetal death certificate for type of death.

Right now in Orange County, the biggest killer is meth--what the textbooks call methamphetamine; others know it as speed or crank. And of course, there is still a lot of crack cocaine. Soon Halka suspects heroin cases will surge.

This is all documented in the coroner’s files. There are photographs, accounts of who said what to whom, histories, lies and then, the truth. It comes in a bleak toxicology report: illicit drugs.

Last year in Orange County, drugs carried through the placenta killed 11 babies in the womb or shortly after birth. Meth killed five, cocaine three, heroin two and one died of a combination of heroin and cocaine.

The year before, the number was six: five from cocaine and the other from speed. All but two of the babies, both years, were white.

So far, it’s too early to make any conjectures about 1991. Definitive toxicology reports can take more than two months.

The numbers, of course, will be grist for the mill. Studies are being done.

The March of Dimes is coordinating one in the hope of finding out how many women in Orange County are taking drugs near the time they give birth. The results should be available in May. Last year, an estimated 5,300 babies born here had illicit drugs in their blood.

The most often cited national survey found 11% of babies born in 36 hospitals had mothers who were taking illegal drugs. That tallies to about 375,000 women in 1988.

The numbers numb.

Here in the coroner’s office, it is the pictures that stun.

These, depending on one’s perspective, show the worst of what drugs have wrought. They are tiny boys and girls, their skin almost as transparent as that of newborn birds. They look, even in death, as if they are suffering pain.

Or perhaps they are lucky. Drug babies who survive suffer more.

The obvious question is what can and should we do? The answers--tentative, halting, couched in the jargon of whatever expert is having a turn--are always full of holes and what-ifs.

There is a movement afoot to put pregnant drug abusers in jail. The rallying cry is fetal rights. The echo of the abortion battle reverberates here. Some pregnant women, in other states, have been charged with murder, child abuse and delivering drugs to their child.

So far, it hasn’t happened here. Still, the Orange County district attorney’s office says one day it could. State law would have to change. If that is what the people want.

The statute for murder says a mother cannot be held responsible for the death of her fetus.

A third party is a different case, with all sorts of ifs. If someone stabs a pregnant woman in the stomach, intending to do harm, a murder charge could be filed. It would depend on how old the fetus was and whether it could survive on its own.

Manslaughter, however, is a fluke. The state can’t prosecute for the manslaughter of a fetus, regardless of age. A 1974 appellate case decided that.

Not that any of this is necessarily bad. Ham-handed laws can cut many ways.

Should we punish a pregnant addict because she has sought help? And if her baby is saved, are we ready to foot the bill? For how long would that be? And what about alcoholics? Their fetal abuse can be just as cruel.

Ignorance blends with tragedy. It is sadly routine.

Just take a look at the coroner’s files.