WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In a petition filed today, ten women asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their suit against a Charleston, South Carolina, hospital that searched them for evidence of drug use -- without a warrant or consent. Arrested and jailed when they sought obstetrical care, many of the women were seized by police right out of their hospital beds. They are asking the Justices to find that the hospital and law enforcement officials violated their rights under the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects all Americans from unreasonable searches.

"The question before the Supreme Court is whether pregnant women have lesser constitutional rights than other Americans, and, as a result, can be searched for evidence of a crime in their private doctor's offices without Fourth Amendment protection," said Priscilla Smith, Deputy Director of Litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights.

"Our clients went to the hospital to get medical help, instead they got jail. Rather than provide them treatment for the disease of drug addiction, the hospital staff collaborated with the police to search pregnant women and new mothers and send them to jail, bound in chains and shackles," said Lynn Paltrow, Director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a program of the Women's Law Project.

Petitioners argue that the case has implications far beyond pregnant women with substance abuse problems. At the heart of this case lies the question: Can hospital staff collaborate with police to search a patient for evidence of drug use - without a warrant or consent - and use the information to facilitate in-hospital arrests?

In July of this year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the hospital's policy did not violate the constitutional right to be free from warrantless, unreasonable searches of one's person. The appellate court reasoned that the policy fell within the legal doctrine allowing an exception in cases in which government officials conduct searches for "special needs." In asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn this finding, the South Carolina women note that the federal courts have never sanctioned such an exception when the search was being conducted for the purpose of gathering criminal evidence. They contend that the Fourth Circuit's view of the "special needs" exception threatens the continued vitality of the 4th Amendment.

The search and arrest policy was implemented in October, 1989, at MUSC, the only hospital in Charleston that serves mostly low-income and African American patients. It was jointly crafted by hospital staff, the local police department, and the prosecutor's office. Pregnant women and new mothers who met certain criteria were subject to searches through urine drug screens carried out without a warrant or consent. The urine tests, as hospital staff testified, were used to identify women who used cocaine so that the police could arrest them. All but one of the 30 women reported and arrested were African American.

The consequences for women subject to search and arrest were severe:

* Lori Griffin was admitted to the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) for observation for premature labor pains. Three days later, she was told she could go home to her 2 children. Instead, she was taken to jail. Unable to make bail, she spent the next three weeks in the prison sick bay with periodic check-ups at MUSC. During her two days of labor and delivery, she was shackled to the hospital bed.

* Ellen Knight received prenatal care at MUSC before the policy was implemented; she was never offered drug treatment. She gave birth to a healthy child who tested positive for cocaine shortly after the policy started. When her two older sons came to take her home from the hospital, she was arrested by the police dressed only in her hospital night gown and still bleeding from childbirth.

* Sandra Powell awoke the morning after her giving birth to find police officers in her room. As she was being removed from her bed and shackled, she pleaded for sanitary pads to stem the post-partum bleeding that had already soaked four pads during the night. Refused pads, she was forced to sit in a holding cell for 5 hours in only a hospital gown.

Until the spring of 1990, no woman who tested positive was given the chance to seek treatment before being arrested. Even after the policy was revised to first inform women to get treatment or face jail, trial testimony showed that the services available at the time were woefully inadequate. Treatment spaces were few, and seldom were pregnant women accepted for care (the hospital's own program initially denied them admission); none provided child care.

The nation's leading medical, public health, and children's groups - including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the March of Dimes - uniformly oppose policies such as this, which attempt to use the criminal justice system to address the problem of substance abuse during pregnancy. They assert that a punitive approach such as threatening women with arrest and jail time is counterproductive: it deters women from seeking critical pre- and post-natal care as well as drug treatment.

MUSC temporarily terminated its policy in 1994 after investigations by two federal agencies. The National Institutes of Health placed the hospital on "probation" after finding that its "research" tracking the policy violated federal law on "experimentation" on human subjects. The Office of Civil Rights also began investigating whether the policy was racially discriminatory. MUSC agreed to stop the arrests to avoid a full-blown inquiry.

In addition to the Center for Reproductive Rights and the Women's Law Project, petitioners in Ferguson v. MUSC are also represented by Charleston attorney Susan K. Dunn.