March 21, 2001, WASHINGTON – Public hospitals cannot test pregnant women for drugs and turn the results over to police without consent, the Supreme Court said in a ruling that buttressed the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches.
Some women who tested positive for drugs at a South Carolina public hospital were arrested from their beds shortly after giving birth.
The justices ruled 6-3 that such testing without patients’ consent violates the Constitution even though the goal was to prevent women from harming their fetuses by using crack cocaine.
“It’s a very, very important decision in protecting the right to privacy of all Americans,” said Priscilla Smith, lawyer for the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, who represented the South Carolina women. “It reaffirms that pregnant women have that same right to a confidential relationship with their doctors.”
Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court that while the ultimate goal of the hospital’s testing program may have been to get women into drug treatment, “the immediate objective of the searches was to generate evidence for law enforcement purposes in order to reach that goal.”
When hospitals gather evidence “for the specific purpose of incriminating those patients, they have a special obligation to make sure that the patients are fully informed about their constitutional rights,” Stevens said.
South Carolina Attorney General Charles Condon, who as a local prosecutor in Charleston began the testing program, issued a statement saying the program can continue if police get a search warrant or the patient’s consent. “There is no right of a mother to jeopardize the health and safety of an unborn child through her own drug abuse,” Condon wrote.
Condon developed the policy along with officials at the Medical University of South Carolina, a Charleston hospital that treats indigent patients. The women were arrested under the state’s child-endangerment law, but their lawyers contended the policy was counterproductive and would deter women from seeking prenatal care.
Stevens’ opinion was joined by Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy filed a separate opinion also concluding such tests are unlawful.
Dissenting were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Writing for the three, Scalia said doctors are supposed to have patients’ welfare in mind, and “that they have in mind in addition the provision of evidence to the police should make no difference.”
The justices ordered a lower court to consider the Charleston hospital’s argument that the women actually consented to the tests.
The Constitution’s Fourth Amendment generally requires that searches be authorized by a court warrant or based on reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed.