South Carolina demagogues shirk responsibility for children's health

On June 13, National Public Radio aired a story on a South Carolina's 
controversial "fetal rights policy."(1) This law holds pregnant mothers 
responsible for preventable birth defects or stillbirths if they use 
drugs. One womyn, who miscarried, has already been charged with murder 
under the law.

Several health workers interviewed correctly expressed concern that the 
law keeps mothers from seeking pre-natal care or treatment for drug 
abuse, because they fear prosecution.

However, the NPR piece failed to present an important piece of evidence 
and allowed the ultra-reactionary demagogues who drafted the "fetal 
rights policy" to set the terms of the debate. Contrary to the "crack 
baby" myth -- which alleges infants born to mothers using crack cocaine are 
much less healthy than other babies ITAL because of crack cocaine END 
-- babies born to mothers using crack are as healthy as those born to 
comparable mothers not using crack.(2)

In other words, "crack babies" are less healthy on average not because 
their mothers use cocaine, but because their mothers come from poor and 
oppressed backgrounds. Just like their peers not using crack, these 
wimmin are themselves less healthy, and do not have access to prenatal 
care -- or distrust government public health initiatives.

Thus the responsibility for these stillbirths and unhealthy infants 
does not lay with their mothers' drug use -- as if the fact that so many 
people feel the need to use and have access to drugs was not already an 
indictment of this decadent society -- rather, the responsibility rests 
with the government which drafted the "fetal rights policy" and a 
society which places profit ahead of basic health care for all.

If Amerikan politicians won't hold themselves accountable to their own 
standards and have themselves locked up for the more than 6,000 infants 
who die every year just because they are Black,(3) then it's up to the 
international proletarian and its allies to do so.

Notes:
1. All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 
2. Laurie Garrett, ITAL Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of the Global 
Public Health, END New York: Hyperion, 2000, pp. 410-411.
3. According to statistics for 1993 (Centers for Disease Control, 
"Infant Mortality -- United States, 1993," Monthly Morbidity and Mortality 
Report, 1995, 45:211-215), the Black infant mortality rate was more than 
2.4 times that of whites. So of the only ca. 4500 of the 10,667 Black 
children who died that year would have died if they had the same access 
to pre-natal care, if health researchers and doctors paid them as much 
attention as white children, etc.