How the ‘Crack Baby’ Scare Armed the Pro-Life Cause
But the Wisconsin law—which is one of four in the country that specifically concern the arrest of pregnant drug users—was ushered through legislatures in 1997 by anti-abortion lobbyists, not drug crusaders. It missed the war on cocaine by almost a decade, and was written after the idea that drug abuse was uniquely damaging to fetuses had been roundly debunked. (Although using drugs while pregnant can be dangerous, in utero exposure to meth and cocaine does not impact IQ, as is commonly believed, and is often indistinguishable from the health impacts that come with poverty, malnourishment, and lack of prenatal care in general.) Rather, the law Beltran is challenging—along with others of its kind—was a sidelong way of codifying the argument that a fetus is a person with rights separate from its mother’s. And that’s exactly what happened in Beltran’s case: The New York Times reported that Wisconsin appointed a legal guardian for her fetus when it called her to court—but not for Beltran. “I didn’t know unborn children had lawyers,” she said recently.
Beltran is not the only woman who has been arrested in the name of her unborn fetus. In fact, one advocacy group providing Beltran’s legal counsel, National Advocates for Pregnant Women, has documented hundreds of them. “Cocaine mom” laws were the precursor to the fetal homicide laws that have enabled most of those arrests. I’ve written in the past about how those statutes have multiplied in the past decade—they now exist in 38 states—thanks to efforts by the anti-abortion movement. Ostensibly written to punish pregnant women’s attackers, fetal homicide laws are often turned on women themselves when they interfere with their own pregnancies, accidentally or intentionally (by, for example, attempting suicide—or simply falling down the stairs). The National Right to Life Committee has called fetal homicide and fetal harm laws a way to “change the hearts and minds of the public on abortion.”