Punish or Protect?

She has never met the woman who has borne eight drug-exposed children. But after having adopted the last four in a matter of six years, Barbara Harris wants to make her stop.

At first, the Stanton homemaker asked the district attorney if he would pursue child abuse charges. When that didn’t work, she went on talk shows and lobbied politicians. Now, she’s pushing a bill that would make bearing drug babies a crime in California and soliciting private donations to pay female substance abusers to obtain long-term contraception.

“If they are that irresponsible,” she said, “somebody has to take control.”

Like other foster parents, grandmothers, social workers and hospital workers left to deal with multiple drug-exposed siblings, Harris is frustrated and angry that there are few real consequences for their addicted mothers who, in the most egregious cases, produce two premature children a year.

Similarly frustrated, officials nationwide have been experimenting with increasingly punitive ways to curb the births of drug babies since the problem exploded with crack cocaine in the 1980s. Since then, there has been positive news that the babies may not be as bad off medically as was first feared, but there is also growing concern that a small group of women is disproportionately responsible for the babies’ tragic circumstances.

In 1992, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 5.5% of all newborns were exposed to illegal drugs during pregnancy, 18% to alcohol and 20% to tobacco, according to a study by the National Institute of Drug Abuse.

That same year, there were 69,000 drug babies born in California, according to the state Department of Social Services.

There is no known research on how many drug babies are from the same mother, but social workers say that more often than not, a small group of the mothers have had one and will have another one.

“Not too many have one and stop,” said social worker Denise Prybella, who knows of women with as many as 11 drug-exposed children.

Becoming the mother of an addicted child would seem to be the ultimate incentive for many women to enter treatment or use birth control. But experts say the phenomenon of multiple drug babies testifies to the power of drugs, the particular vulnerability of women addicts--who sometimes trade sex for drugs--and the lack of appropriate and available treatment programs.

Ira Chasnoff, president of the Chicago-based National Assn. for Families and Addiction Research and Education, said many addicted women live in a male-dominated world with very little power in their day-to-day lives. “Often the only times a woman feels safe or protected is when she is engaging in a sexual encounter,” he said. For most, who have a history of being sexually abused, getting pregnant is a way of expressing their femininity and sexuality.

Contrary to conventional thinking, removing their children only exacerbates the problem, Chasnoff said. “Studies have shown that when you automatically take babies away from [an addicted woman], she is much more likely to get pregnant again, faster, with a replacement baby.”

Another Los Angeles activist, the legal guardian for five of her daughter’s six drug-exposed children, said she used to think her daughter would keep having children until social workers let her keep one. “She’s like a cat trying to replace a lost kitten,” said the woman, who serves on the boards of several caregiver organizations.

The 58-year-old widow with five grown children of her own began taking in her daughter’s children 18 years ago, when the girl dropped out of high school and began running with a crowd that used PCP, cocaine and alcohol. All five grandchildren have medical problems, including heart murmurs and learning disabilities, and qualify for public assistance, she said.

The woman, whose name The Times is withholding, doesn’t believe in adoption. Nevertheless, she was so angry with her daughter, she once asked a doctor to give her a hysterectomy. Now, she said, her daughter is 34, still trying to get off drugs, but apparently can no longer have children. The woman said she feels “blessed.”

Similarly, Harris, 43, also wanted to keep her then-foster daughter’s siblings together. Six years ago, she and her husband, Smitty, who already had six children between them, became foster parents of an 8-month-old girl, the fifth child of the Los Angeles woman who Harris said has had the same partner for years. The baby tested positive to PCP, crack and heroin. Four months later, the Harrises heard she had a new brother and took him in.

Over the next two years, the woman had two more babies, and Harris took each in, eventually adopting them and growing more frustrated and angry each time. “Even though it was my choice to take them in, I resented her for having so many and not caring,” she said. “It was like she just disposed of them and it didn’t matter.”

She said she has sent the mother pictures of the children and letters, but “she doesn’t acknowledge me.” The children had withdrawal symptoms in the beginning but later, other than colds and coughs, Harris said they have shown few of the dire medical or behavioral problems once predicted for drug babies. Destiny, a talkative 6-year-old with a seemingly permanent smile, has a high IQ of 138 and delights her teachers, Harris said.

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Chasnoff, the president of the National Assn. for Families and Addiction Research and Education, said the great majority of drug-exposed children have normal cognitive development. But, he said, by age 6 or 7, they frequently develop behavioral problems that can affect their academic performance.

Harris’ personal campaign to persuade addicted women to use birth control is fueled, she said, by the knowledge that other drug babies are often not as lucky as hers. Drug babies can drift through reunification and foster care programs and do not have the security of a caring, permanent home from infancy. Harris wants to gather donations to pay pregnant addicts up to $500 to get the birth control implant Norplant, an IUD or have their tubes tied.

In recent years, officials in more than 30 states have arrested and charged at least 200 women--including four in California--for exposing their fetuses to drugs or alcohol, according to the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy in New York. Priscilla Smith, a lawyer for the center, said the cases had all either been dropped or overturned on appeal, until two months ago.

In July, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled specifically that a woman could be prosecuted for child abuse if she takes actions during the third trimester that might harm her fetus. The decision upheld an eight-year sentence for Cornelia Whitner, whose 8-year-old son was born exposed to cocaine.

Elsewhere, it is not a crime to have a drug baby, but social workers will typically remove children if they suspect the mothers cannot adequately care for them. Only a few states have revised their child protection laws to require reporting of a newborn’s positive drug test. In California, one bill, the Infant Health and Protection Act, carried by Assemblyman Brett Granlund (R-Yucaipa), would increase the chances of children being removed from substance-abusing parents by requiring all hospitals to screen and report drug-exposed infants to social services as a condition of licensing.

Another bill, AB 2614, proposed by Phil Hawkins (R-Bellflower), would create the crime of “prenatal child neglect” and force women who give birth to drug-exposed children to choose between treatment or jail. This is the bill inspired by Harris. Many other states have introduced measures to penalize pregnant women with substance abuse problems, but facing widespread opposition from the medical community and civil rights advocates, none so far has passed, Smith said.

Both California bills were sidelined until the next legislative session.

The idea of punishing troubled, pregnant women, or coercing them to use birth control, is repugnant to critics who recall the forced sterilization of mentally disabled women in the 1950s. They argue that substance abuse is a health problem, not a criminal problem, and that prosecution will drive women from needed prenatal care. Many fear that in the current climate, minorities will be unfairly targeted.

Already, studies of individual cases of prosecution of drug mothers have shown that 85% are women of color, said New York Dr. Stephen Kandall, a neonatologist and author of “Substance and Shadow” (Harvard University Press, 1996), a history of women and addiction. “It seems politically safe to go after this population,” he said.

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There will be no one solution to solving drug abuse because the problem is so widespread and resistant to treatment, said Kandall, who favors education and prevention.

One of the problems is that while women probably constitute the majority of the country’s addicts (if pills, tranquilizers and psychotropics are counted), addiction is still considered a man’s problem, he said. “You can make a case they should get equal attention to men. I think they need more,” he said. “There’s more in their personal life histories that needs to be addressed.”

But he predicted that as welfare reform takes hold, and money for drug treatment becomes more scarce, the problem is only going to become worse.

One Los Angeles mother, who had five children with three men during the 13 years she was on drugs, said the only reason she finally quit was that she became fed up with her lifestyle, living in garages and vacant houses.

Even now Sandra Matthews, 39, said she can’t explain why she didn’t use birth control. She just figured her children would be OK because her mother was raising them. “As long as you know someone is going to take care of it, hey, why not?”

Matthews, who has been reunited with all her children, said it wasn’t until she stopped using drugs two years ago that she realized what she had done to the children. “Guilt ran all over me,” she said. One girl, born while Matthews was high on crack, attends a school for children with learning disabilities.

Through the help of a Christian-based recovery program, Matthews said she has given up drugs. She also uses Depo Provera, a three-month birth control given by injection.

Interestingly, Matthews favors the Hawkins proposal, giving pregnant addicts a choice of treatment or jail. “Not as a punishment,” she said. “But it would make them stop and think about what they’re doing.” Or some of them, anyway.

Outside her home in South-Central Los Angeles, she watches a woman pushing a basket up and down the street. Four or five times she’s seen her pregnant. But she’s never seen a baby.

Matthews has briefly thought about approaching the woman. But she knows it won’t do any good. “You don’t care about nothing or nobody. It’s something she has to realize herself.”