The New York Times highlights the case of Alicia Beltran, a pregnant Wisconsin woman who was locked up because she admitted to a physician's assistant that she had had been hooked on Percocet (oxycodone). Beltran had stopped using Percocet with help from a substitute opiate, Suboxone (buprenorphine), and she was no longer using either drug. The physician's assistant nevertheless recommended that she start taking Suboxone again. After Beltran declined, social workers and cops got involved, the upshot being a court order sending her to Casa Clare, a drug treatment center in Appleton, where she was confined until October 4. Beltran, who is currently about 29 weeks into her pregnancy, also faces a charge of negligence that could theaten her parental rights after her baby is born.
All this was authorized by a 1997 Wisconsin law that allows detention and forced treatment of any pregnant woman who "habitually lacks self-control in the use of alcohol beverages, controlled substances or controlled substance analogs, exhibited to a severe degree, to the extent that there is a substantial risk that the physical health of the unborn child, and of the child when born, will be seriously affected or endangered unless the expectant mother receives prompt and adequate treatment for that habitual lack of self-control." In Beltran's case, the expectant mother was abstinent, a fact confirmed by urine tests, so it is hard to see in what sense she was experiencing a "habitual lack of self-control." Furthermore, the drug that the government wanted her to take, buprenorphine, seems to pose a greater hazard to fetuses than oxycodone, the drug to which she had been addicted.
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