Abstract

This dissertation explores and articulates the underpinnings of public policy regarding pregnant substance abusers and the current emphasis on fetal rights and protection. After elucidating the extant scientific research regarding the effects of illegal drug use in the perinatal period, arguments for and against state intervention into pregnancy are presented. Arguments against state intervention, coupled with the lack of scientific evidence of specific harm caused by the use of cocaine during pregnancy then lead to a discussion of an alternative agenda addressed by current public policy. The historical underpinnings of this agenda are then presented through analysis of appellate court cases involving the entrance of women into the public world of the workplace. ;Public policy approaches to drug abuse by pregnant women have been reduced to legal attempts to impose restrictions on maternal behavior during the pregnancy, or to take the child away from the mother shortly after birth. None of these approaches has been successful. The reason for their lack of success depends less on the courts or the problem of drug abusing pregnant women than it does on the fact that the underlying agenda being addressed through these approaches is not about drug use, although it is about women. The emergence of "fetal rights" and the newfound view of the innocent fetus in need of protection from its own mother reflects an old phenomenon and basic societal contradiction: The notion of fetal rights is less about reproduction than it is about the problems men and women have in situating themselves in the public world in times of great economic, social, and political change. The attempts to criminalize, restrict, or otherwise regulate the behavior of pregnant substance abusing women speak more about the very important ways in which women's association with reproduction continues to be used as the basis for efforts to determine women's status as citizens. Fetal rights issues, the most recent iteration of these efforts, raise fundamental questions about the difference between men's and women's relationship to citizenship and state/political power