Crack Cocaine and a Stillborn Fetus
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 6:07 PM

Vice policy, alas, involves more than it share of unhappy and unsettling
stories. Mark Kleiman reports that last month the Supreme Court issued an
order denying the appeal of a South Carolina woman who was convicted
of homicide when her pregnancy of 8.5 months ended with a stillbirth,
and who tested positive for cocaine. The woman was given a 20-year
jail term, with 8 years suspended. A Christian Science Monitor story
(linked by Kleiman) on the court order can be found here.

The ingestion of any drug by a pregnant woman, including legal drugs like
alcohol and nicotine, generally is not a good thing for the fetus, and in
significant doses, is almost assuredly not a good thing. Perhaps surprisingly,
however, the evidence that there is substantial damage to a fetus from
maternal cocaine use is rather scanty. (Read Stanton Peele's summary here.)
Professor Kleiman notes: "...there is precisely no medical evidence that
maternal cocaine use can cause stillbirth."

Labels: cocaine, Kleiman