-The United States Supreme Court heard arguments today in a case that tests the rights of all Americans to keep their medical information confidential. The Center for Reproductive Rights and the Women's Law Project (WLP), which represent the ten women plaintiffs in Ferguson v. City of Charleston, argued that the Medical University of South Carolina and local police and prosecutors violated the constitutional rights of pregnant women seeking medical care by collaborating to secretly search them for cocaine use and arrest them if results were positive. Besides being an unconstitutional violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects all Americans from unreasonable searches, this scheme undermined the doctor-patient relationship and ultimately endangered the health of women and their babies.
The "Search and Arrest" policy was initiated in 1989 as a joint effort between the hospital and local law enforcement officials. A targeted group of pregnant women was subject to secret urine searches to test for cocaine use without a warrant or consent. Results were reported to police who arrested 30 women over a 5-year period. Some of the women were handcuffed and arrested from their hospital beds immediately after giving birth; others were arrested and jailed while still pregnant.
"What the plaintiffs are asking the Court to do is simple: guarantee that drug dependent women who seek medical care are able, like the rest of us, to talk confidentially about their health problems," said Priscilla Smith, Deputy Director of Litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights and lead counsel in Ferguson v. City of Charleston. "Every major medical organization, including the American Medical Association (AMA) agrees that providing appropriate medical care is the only effective way to treat drug addicted pregnant women. We agree with the AMA that this was a shocking abuse of police and government power," said Smith.
"Poor, sick women needing pre-natal care were betrayed by their medical providers and turned over to the police," said Sue Frietsche, Staff Attorney at WLP. "Some of the women were still bleeding; the search policy had nothing to do with the children's health."
The nation's leading medical, public health and children's groups - including the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists - uniformly oppose using such punitive methods to address the problem of substance abuse during pregnancy. These groups are among the 75 organizations and individual experts that filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court on behalf of the plaintiffs. They assert that threatening women with arrest and jail time deters them from seeking critical prenatal care and drug treatment and could thereby actually harm their health and the health of their children. These groups also assert that those who promote prosecutions ignore the severe shortage of drug treatment programs, especially those that will accept pregnant women or provide services needed by women with young children at home.
Under established law, the government must obtain a warrant based on probable cause before searching an individual for evidence to be used in an arrest and prosecution. Although a limited exception to the Fourth Amendment's requirements of a warrant and probable cause exists when a search policy serves a special need beyond the normal needs of law enforcement, the "special needs" exception has been carefully limited by the Supreme Court. While acknowledging the involvement of law enforcement in the policy, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit nevertheless applied the "special needs" exception here to excuse the searches, pointing to the "special need" to promote maternal and fetal health. The "special needs" balancing test, applied by the Fourth Circuit, has never before been applied - by the United States Supreme Court or any other court - to a search primarily serving the normal needs of law enforcement and has never been applied to searches of citizens, such as the Petitioners, whose reasonable expectation of privacy is undiminished.
In addition to the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Petitioners are also represented by the Women's Law Project, Philadelphia attorneys David Rudovsky and Seth Kreimer, and Charleston attorney Susan K. Dunn. The brief filed in the case Ferguson v. City of Charleston (99-936) can be found on our website here.
Ferguson v. City of Charleston
