A New Strategy for Pregnancy Police?

By now, we are well into the double-takes phase of our morning routine. This is understandable. My running partner is mere weeks from giving birth to her second child. To avoid bruising her increasingly delicate feelings by conjuring a metaphor based on leviathans, bovines or pachyderms, let me just say that in her running get-up, she is a sight to behold. Hence the wide-eyed stares, the marveling whistles, the tsk-ing of tongues.

But so far, no arrest.

At the extreme, the pregnancy police have confined their actions to rhetorical interrogatories “on behalf” of the fetus: Wouldn’t walking be just as good? Aren’t you pushing yourself a little too hard?

It’s a mystery how she maintains her good humor, faced not just with these intrusions, but with coffee shop baristas who inform her she’s having decaf when she orders ultracaf, with waiters who push soft drinks when she asks for a rare glass of beer. She’d not be so cheerful if she knew how many people would love to charge her with a crime for sipping a brew after a three-mile run.

Maybe she should carry a permission slip from the doctor noting that her exercise routine and beverage choices have been sanctioned by a board-certified obstetrician. Doubtful, though, that such a document would even be recognized by the gestation gestapo.

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Any woman who has ever been visibly pregnant can describe the odd sensation of her belly suddenly becoming “community property,” the peculiar way that strangers reach to pat it as they offer folksy pronouncements about the relationship of its shape and altitude to the gender of the coming child. As long as the intentions are benign, the intrusions are tolerable, even mildly amusing.

Increasingly, however, the intrusions are coming from a less benevolent population--prosecutors--who would jail mothers for indulging in behavior that could be counter to the interests of the fetus. More and more, pregnant women are being pitted against a part of themselves as society struggles to reconcile the sometimes conflicting rights of pregnant women with the children they carry.

South Carolina’s Supreme Court recently ruled that a woman can be charged with child abuse for ingesting drugs while pregnant, thereby conferring the status of personhood on a healthy, viable fetus. The boy on whom the case turned was born with cocaine in his system. He is now a healthy 8-year-old; his mother’s eight-year prison sentence has been reinstated.

Another dramatic scene in this painful national drama has been playing out the past half-year in the small Wisconsin city of Racine, where a 35-year-old alcoholic waitress with a troubled past is making pregnancy history.

On March 16, a drunken Deborah Zimmerman, who once served time for killing a man in a drunk-driving accident, gave birth to a drunken baby girl. The baby, Meagan, showed telltale signs of fetal alcohol syndrome at birth, including a blood alcohol level almost twice what Wisconsin defines as legal intoxication.

At the hospital, where she was about to undergo an emergency C-section, Zimmerman was said to have screamed at a surgical aide: “If you don’t keep me here, I’m just going to go home and keep drinking and drinking and drink myself to death. And I’m going to kill this thing because I don’t want it anyways.”

A boozy mother. A boozy baby. And what the prosecutors call a “death threat.” Add it up, and what you get is a woman who is believed to be the first in the country to face trial on charges of attempted murder for drinking while pregnant. Zimmerman faces the possibility of 40 years in prison.

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The conundrums of these cases--of the whole murky business of maternal versus fetal rights--abound. If a woman can be prosecuted for drinking while pregnant--which, by the way, is not illegal--could another be prosecuted for smoking cigarettes and birthing an underweight baby? For endangering her unborn child by failing to heed a doctor’s bed rest orders? For becoming pregnant while obese, thus doubling, or in the case of the extremely obese even quadrupling, the chance of neural tube defects?

Sending the postpartum miscreant to the pokey is just another example of the great, failed American tradition of trying to eradicate undesirable behavior by criminalizing it.

How likely will a pregnant woman be to seek help if she faces prison time for admitting she’s got a problem?

If prosecutors win their case against Zimmerman, some women’s health advocates foresee dire implications for women whose pregnancies end badly: “Anything a woman did could make her subject to homicide prosecution,” an attorney at the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy in New York told a reporter, including reckless driving, ignoring a doctor’s cautions . . . or jogging. (And will jogging partners then be charged with aiding and abetting?)

Suggestion: Give help, not jail time, to women who put their unborn children at risk.

And let the pregnant joggers, coffee drinkers, and once-in-a-while beer quaffers indulge their pleasures in peace.

* Robin Abcarian’s column appears on Sundays and Wednesdays. Readers may write to her at the Los Angeles Times, Life & Style, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053.