Washington — Reinforcing the Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a South Carolina public hospital violated the rights of pregnant women when it gave police their drug-test results without their explicit permission.
The justices ruled 6-3 that while the intent of the testing program was laudable to prevent women from harming their fetuses by using crack cocaine it ran afoul of the Fourth Amendment's requirement that consent or court-issued search warrants are necessary before test information is shared with law enforcement authorities. Some of the women who tested positive were arrested if they refused to enter a drug treatment program.
Lori Griffin, left, and Patricia Williams challenged South Carolina's policy of requiring pregnant women who tested positive for cocaine to get substance abuse treatment or face jail time.
"It's a very, very important decision in protecting the right to privacy of all Americans," said Priscilla Smith, a lawyer for the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, a nonprofit group that represented the 10 women who brought the suit. "It reaffirms that pregnant women have that same right to a confidential relationship with their doctors."
"The court put public health ahead of drug enforcement," added Kevin Zeese, president of Common Sense for Drug Policy, a nonprofit advocacy group, who contended the Charleston program deterred poor pregnant women from going to the clinic.
In the court's majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that while the hospital's goal may have been to get women into drug treatment programs and to protect their fetuses, "the immediate objective of the searches was to generate evidence for law enforcement purposes."
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.
Stevens' opinion was joined by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Justice Anthony Kennedy filed a separate opinion also concluding such tests are unlawful. Dissenting were Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
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