Crime and the Myth of the Perfect Mother

It was not, apparently, a hard call to make. It took the South Carolina jury only 15 minutes to decide that Regina McKnight belongs in prison, that she was guilty of killing the child in her womb by smoking crack cocaine during pregnancy.

McKnight, 24, delivered a stillborn baby 35 weeks into her pregnancy. Doctors found cocaine in the systems of both mother and child, and McKnight was prosecuted for homicide. She was convicted and sentenced last week to 12 years in prison.

The case has alarmed some women’s groups, who worry that it could embolden the government to intrude on pregnant women in other ways--to punish them for drinking or smoking or not getting enough sleep, if that behavior might harm their developing babies.

Others see McKnight’s treatment as harsh, but not heartless; a hard-line approach that reflects our frustration over what to do about drug-addicted moms and signals our weariness with the societal problems their dereliction of maternal duty has caused.

What will it take, we wonder, to get their attention, to stem the tide of neglected children flooding our foster-care system and filling our juvenile halls?

Money? An Orange County woman--she has adopted four of the eight children born to a drug-addicted mother--has started a program that offers $200 to drug-abusing women who get sterilized.

The permanent loss of parenting rights? New laws have limited to six months the time addicted parents have to kick drugs before losing their babies to adoption.

Or maybe the threat of jail?

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There’s a public picture of Regina McKnight that fits tidily into our image of the irresponsible crack-head mom. She is unmarried, uneducated, on welfare; the mother of three other kids who are all being raised by relatives. While living in a homeless shelter awaiting trial, she got pregnant once again, with a baby who’ll be delivered behind prison walls.

But there is another portrait that her supporters paint of a poor woman with no coping skills and limited intelligence--her IQ is 72--who never used drugs until someone offered them to her at her mother’s funeral. A woman who desperately wanted her dead baby, who named her, mourned her and responded to the jury’s guilty verdict by crying out for her own mother.

“Regina McKnight didn’t have a chance,” says Wyndi Anderson, executive director of South Carolina Advocates for Pregnant Women, a group fighting laws that criminalize addiction during pregnancy.

“The jury was reacting to our romanticized myth of mother: ‘How could she do drugs when she knew it could kill her baby?’ We want motherhood to be some sort of magic thing that overcomes addiction, poverty . . . that allows [abused] women to birth perfect children and to raise them perfectly.”

Across the country, states are stepping up efforts to emphasize the responsibilities of pregnancy. At least 17 have enacted civil laws making it possible for authorities to seize the newborns of women who test positive for drugs during pregnancy. Others require pregnant addicts to enroll in treatment programs. And a handful--including Texas, Georgia and Pennsylvania--have filed criminal charges of neglect against women whose newborns were exposed in utero to drugs.

But, so far, only South Carolina has explicitly extended criminal child-abuse laws to cover fetuses, subjecting women who use drugs during pregnancy to prison sentences of 10 years or more.

“It’s supposed to reflect our concern for the babies, but it’s really just a new way to prosecute poor, drug-addicted women,” Anderson says. “If this were really about healthy babies, we’d see services like health care, counseling. . . . This is a convenient way to dispose of the problem. Lock Regina McKnight up, and you’re done.”

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From her courtroom in Los Angeles County’s Dependency Court, Guillermina Byrne sees the fallout of our failed war on drugs--as she decides the fate of a daily procession of children who have been taken away from drug-addicted moms, and the desperate women trying to get them back.

“I’ve had mothers really, really try,” she says. “They get treatment, and they go to meetings, and they stay sober for months. Then two days before I’m set to return the children to them, they disappear or show up with a dirty [drug] test.”

Others get their children back and remain sober for three or four years, “then they relapse and wind up in court [for neglect] again. “And I think, ‘What are you doing? How many chances can I give you?’ ” Byrne has struggled to understand the lure of a drug so strong it makes mothers abandon their young.

“We had a [court] conference with a medical doctor who explained how long-term drug use can change the structure of the brain, the way it processes joy, comfort, happiness, contentment,” she says. So the simple pleasures of motherhood don’t tend to register, and it can take years away from drugs for good judgment to return.

“So I asked the doctor,” Byrne says, “given what you’re saying, is it ever really safe to return a child to a drug-addicted mother? And he said, ‘As a doctor who works with these mothers, I’d have to say yes. But as a pediatrician who treats these children, I’d have to say no.’ That was a painful thing for us to hear.”

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Anderson’s view--born of her own experience--is not quite so bleak. She was raised by alcoholic parents and spent her adolescence battling an addiction to drugs and alcohol. She’s been sober for 14 years. “Neither one of my parents is sober, but they’re still good parents,” she says. “They did a lot of drugs when I was a kid, but nobody ever came and took me away. And I turned out all right. So I know these women are not the horrible monsters we make them out to be.”

What they need, she says, is not punishment, but treatment that respects the mother-child bond; that honors, not diminishes, their efforts at mothering,

“I understand the frustration with these women,” she says. “I understand why folks get angry. But we need to understand that this is not a simple problem. We can’t say, ‘Let’s save the children and give up on their mothers.’

“The children need to hear that the system cares about their mothers too. Otherwise we’re conditioning a whole generation of kids to believe that their mothers are throwaways, that we can do without them. If we value the children, we have to value the mother, the woman.”

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Sandy Banks’ column runs on Tuesdays and Sundays. She’s at sandy.banks@latimes.com.