Abstract
This chapter focuses on the “crack baby”—an object of knowledge that ostensibly warned against the evil of pregnant women who used drugs, in particular, the newly created crack cocaine. The panic over large numbers of pregnant women using crack ultimately came to delineate the racial boundaries surrounding women’s rights to control their bodies. By pitting pregnant women’s drug use against the notion of a fetus’s right to be born free of birth defects, prosecutors of cocaine-using mothers created a situation where a woman’s right to procreative freedom was incompatible with a choice to use drugs. Presented in this way, these women had only two options: discontinue their drug use (by entering a treatment program or being sent to jail), or have an abortion. The constitutional protections recently established in Roe v. Wade were already under virulent attack from ascendant prolife forces. In this, the crack baby scare was part of a larger conservative cultural offensive against the permissiveness of the 1960s and 1970s, of which drug experimentation was a major part.
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Notes
See Susan Markens, C. H. Browner, and Nancy Press, “Feeding the Fetus: On Interrogating the Notion of Maternal-Fetal Conflict Author(s),” Feminist Studies 23, no. 2 (1997): 352.
See the first chapter of Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1991).
Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), National Drug Control Strategy: 2000 Annual Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2000), 115.
Ibid.
ONDCP, National Drug Control Strategy, 1997: FY 1998 Budget Summary (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2000), table 3.
United States Sentencing Commission, Report to the Congress: Cocaine and Federal Sentencing Policy (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2007), 2.
Ibid., B-23.
Drew Humphries, Crack Mothers: Pregnancy, Drugs, and the Media (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 160.
Ibid., 162.
Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 8–9.
Laura E. Gómez, Misconceiving Mothers: Legislators, Prosecutors, and the Politics of Prenatal Drug Exposure (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1997), 15.
David H. Angeli, “A ‘Second Look’ at Crack Cocaine Sentencing Policies: One More Try for Federal Equal Protection,” American Criminal Law Review 34, no. 3 (1997): 1212.
Ibid.
Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine, eds. Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 3.
See Ira J. Chasnoff, William J. Burns, Sidney H. Schnoll, and Kayreen A. Burns, “Cocaine in Pregnancy,” New England Journal of Medicine (September 12, 1985): 666–669.
Ana Teresa Ortiz and Laura Briggs, “The Culture of Poverty, Crack Babies, and Welfare Cheats: The Making of the ‘Healthy White Baby Crisis,’” Social Text 21, no. 3 (2003): 46.
Evan Thomas, “America’s Crusade,” Time, September 15, 1986, 60.
Lamar Jr., Jacob V., David Beckwith, and Michael Duffy, “Rolling Out the Big Guns,” Time, September 22, 1986, 25.
Ellen Hopkins, “Childhood’s End,” Rolling Stone, October 18, 1990, 72.
Barbara Kantrowitz, “The Crack Children,” Newsweek, February 12, 1990, 62.
Sandra Blakeslee, “Crack’s Toll Among Babies: A Joyless View, Even of Toys,” New York Times, September 17, 1989, A26.
Ibid., A1.
Ibid.
Anna Quindlen, “Hearing the Cries of Crack,” New York Times, October 7, 1990, E19.
Sandra Blakeslee, “Child-Rearing Is Story When Drugs Cloud Birth,” New York Times, May 19, 1990, A9.
Tessa Melvin, “When Mothers and Infants Are Addicts,” New York Times, September 23, 1990, WC12.
Susan Chira, “Crack Babies Turn 5, and Schools Brace,” New York Times, May 25, 1990, B5.
Cynthia R. Daniels, “Between Fathers and Fetuses: The Social Construction of Male Reproduction and the Politics of Fetal Harm,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 22, no. 3 (1997): 579.
Dorothy E. Roberts, “Unshackling Black Motherhood,” Michigan Law Review 95, no. 4 (1997): 949–950.
Douglas J. Besharov, “Crack Babies: The Worst Threat Is Mom Herself,” Washington Post, August 6, 1989, B1.
Besharov, “Crack Babies,” B1. Senator Daniel Moynihan says this as well: “Heroin was a male drug…. Cocaine increasingly is a female drug.” (Karl Vick, “Addicted Mothers Hard Put to Find Help,” St. Petersburg Times [Florida], June 29, 1990, 6A). This is just one example of how crack cocaine was used as a powerful political issue by all parties.
Dorothy L. Roberts, “Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy,” Harvard Law Review 104, no. 7 (1991): 1420. In 1977, Margaret Velasquez Reyes was charged in California with counts of felony child endangerment for using heroin while pregnant (Susan C. Boyd, From Witches to Crack Moms: Women, Drug Law, and Policy [Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2004], 108). The California Court of Appeals specifically stopped further prosecutions from following this line of argument, since fetuses do not count as “children” and could thus not be endangered (Linda C. Fentiman, “In the Name of Fetal Protection: Why American Prosecutors Pursue Pregnant Drug Users [and Other Countries Don’t],” Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 18, no. 2 [2009]: 648).
Bruce Vielmetti, “Lawyer Advocates Prosecuting Mothers of Cocaine Babies,” St. Petersburg Times (Florida), January 28, 1990, BT5.
Charles Krauthammer, “Children of Cocaine,” Washington Post, July 30, 1989, C7.
Richard Cohen, “When a Fetus Has More Rights,” Washington Post, July 28, 1988, A21.
Peter Wolf, “The Case of Brenda Vaughan: The Judge Explains His Decision,” Washington Post, September 4, 1988, C8.
Ibid.
Victoria Churchville, “D.C. Judge Jails Woman as Protection for Cocaine,” Washington Post, July 23, 1988, A1.
Mariah Blake, “The Damage Done: Crack Babies Talk Back,” Columbia Journalism Review 43, no. 3 (2004): 10.
Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 212.
Michael de Courcy Hinds, “The Instincts of Parenthood Become Part of Crack’s Toll” New York Times, March 17, 1990, A8.
Richard P. Kusserow, Crack Babies (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1990), 5.
Priscilla Van Tassel, “Schools Trying to Cope with ‘Crack Babies,’” New York Times, January 5, 1992, NJ10.
Ortiz and Briggs, “The Culture of Poverty,” 44. For a thorough discussion of methodology and results, see the meta-analysis: Deborah A. Frank, Marilyn Augustyn, Wanda Grant Knight, Tripler Pell, and Barry Zuckerman, “Growth, Development, and Behavior in Early Childhood Following Prenatal Cocaine Exposure: A Systematic Review,” JAMA (March 28, 2001): 1613–1625.
Katherine E. Bono, Nurit Sheinberg, Keith G. Scott, and Angelika H. Claussen, “Early Intervention for Children Prenatally Exposed to Cocaine,” Infants and Young Children 20, no. 1 (2007): 26.
Susan Okie, “The Epidemic That Wasn’t,” New York Times, January 27, 2009: D1.
Ronald Reagan, “Radio Address to the Nation on Education and Drug Abuse Sept. 6, 1986,” The Public Papers of President Ronald W. Reagan, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, n.p. http://www.reagan.utexas.edu//archives/speeches/1986/090686a.htm.
Earl Wysong, Richard Aniskiewicz, and David Wright, “Truth and DARE: Tracking Drug Education,” Social Problems 41, no. 3 (1994): 449. Wysong reports that “in 1990 D.A.R.E. programs were in place in more than 3,000 communities in all 50 states and were reaching an estimated 20 million students” (Ibid.).
Ibid., 448.
Ibid., 463–464.
Sharon F. Golden, “The New-Collar Class: Beatniks, Preppies, and Punkers — The Love Affair with Labels.” U.S. News & World Report, September 16, 1985, 485.
Randall Rothenberg, “22% Rise in Donations for Public Service Ads,” New York Times, June 2, 1989, D13.
Richard Miller, “Directors Saying Yes to Help People Say No to Drugs,” Back Stage, March 13, 1987, 1.
Cynthia Cotts, “Hard Sell in the Drug War,” The Nation, March 9, 1992, 301.
Joshua Levine, “Don’t Fry Your Brain,” Forbes, February 2, 1991, 116.
Lauren G. Block, Vicki G. Morwitz, William P. Putsis Jr., and Subrata K. Sen, “Assessing the Impact of Antidrug Advertising on Adolescent Drug Consumption: Results from a Behavioral Economic Model,” American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 8 (2002): 1346–1351.
Michael J. Ludwig, “The Cultural Politics of Prevention: Reading Anti-Drug Public Service Announcements,” in Undressing the Ad: Reading Culture in Advertising, ed. Katherine Toland Frith (New York: Peter Lang, 1998): 168.
Ibid.
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© 2016 Kevin L. Ferguson
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Ferguson, K.L. (2016). The Crack Baby: Children Fight the War on Drugs. In: Eighties People. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137584342_3
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