Pregnant Sect Member’s Case Is a Rights Quandary

BOSTON — Locked in a Massachusetts state facility, Rebecca Corneau is an unlikely feminist heroine.

She is deeply religious, part of an intensely fundamentalist Christian sect that denounces modern society and relies on prayer over law, medicine or any other mortal contrivance. She also is close to nine months pregnant.

Corneau, 32, has become a reluctant cause celebre since authorities placed her in protective custody--forced hospitalization, in effect--because they suspect her infant son and another baby born into the sect died when the religious group failed to seek medical help.

No bodies have been found, but prosecutors contend that both children died and that the deaths were preventable. Now, authorities say they are keeping the mother in custody to ensure the safety of her unborn child, a case that has raised concerns about religious freedom, a woman’s right to privacy over her own body and whether a pregnant woman can be forced to have prenatal care.

A Juvenile Court judge on Thursday upheld his decision to keep Corneau confined until her baby is born, saying he could hear the unborn child’s voice.

“And it said, ‘I want to live. I do not want to die. I do not want to die like my brother Jeremiah did,’ ” District Court Judge Kenneth Nasif said.

The case in Attleboro, Mass., near the Rhode Island border, appears to be without precedent, legal analysts say. And while Corneau herself eschews legal counsel, her situation has attracted a bandwagon of supporters who criticize the confinement as a violation of her civil rights.

Others side with Nasif and prosecutor Paul Walsh, who contend the moral urgency of protecting this fetus outweighs the “technical, legal, right-or-wrong” issue of Corneau’s privileges.

She has refused a medical exam and declined to see the nurse Nasif ordered to visit her. In court, Corneau stands alone and answers in polite monosyllables. The judge has appointed an attorney to represent “Unborn Child Corneau,” as the fetus is described.

Corneau is a member of a 13-member band of believers that takes its doctrine from the Old Testament and the Home in Zion Ministries in Florida. The group views science and medicine as blasphemy and denies the existence of the United States. In addition, the sect denounces education, government, banking and entertainment. The group supports itself through a masonry business.

The nameless sect is the subject of a grand jury probe into the 1999 deaths of Jeremiah Corneau, who is alleged to have died during or shortly after birth, and 10-month old Samuel Robidoux--son of the group’s leader--who allegedly starved to death after he stopped nursing.

Authorities allege the group buried two small coffins in a Maine state park last summer. Officials have searched unsuccessfully for the bodies in three disparate locations. Prosecutors are seeking charges against sect members ranging from improper disposal of a body to murder.

Eight members of the group have been jailed for refusing to talk to the Bristol County Grand Jury. Corneau’s three remaining children and five others have been removed from the group and placed in foster care. In the course of those proceedings, Corneau was declared an unfit mother.

Massachusetts authorities say the case may be the first example of an apparently healthy pregnant woman who has not been convicted of a crime or drug abuse being forced into custody to protect an unborn child. Walsh, the prosecutor, explained his reasoning: “We have two dead babies. I don’t want another dead baby.”

Andi Mullin, president of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Organization for Women, acknowledged that in trying to prevent an infant death, state authorities probably acted out of noble intentions.

“But the implications of this action are alarming,” she said. “Are we going to start incarcerating pregnant women for smoking? Skiing? Skateboarding? Do we lock them up at 8 1/2 months? Three months? One month?”

She decried the irony of “forcing prenatal care on this woman who did not want it and has a right not to have it when there are women and children in this state and elsewhere who are literally dying for health care.

“There are no judges ordering doctors and nurses into the homes of the working poor and providing them with the care they need. Instead, we’re forcing it on this woman who doesn’t want it.”

Boston reproductive rights lawyer Wendy Murphy was so outraged by the Corneau decision that she filed a request Wednesday for review with the Supreme Judicial Court, the highest court in Massachusetts. Claiming that women’s rights are “chilled and threatened” by Nasif’s ruling, Murphy entered her request on behalf of a woman identified only as Barbara F who is six months pregnant. Murphy’s petition said the woman is concerned that she too could be forced into custody.

Murphy has no relationship with Corneau. “She’s not my client, she doesn’t want a lawyer and she has a perfect right not to have one,” Murphy said. “My interest was that I thought the ruling was so patently unconstitutional, coupled with the public comments from the district attorney, who said, essentially, the constitutional issues were interesting, but let’s talk about those after we have a healthy baby. That’s like shoot now, ask questions later.”

A mother of four, Murphy remembered climbing a ladder and hanging shutters when she was nine months pregnant. “God help me if someone told Paul Walsh,” she said, adding that, “What people don’t appreciate is how simple the notion is of what’s at stake: Women have the right to make choices about medical care for their bodies, and they have that right when they are pregnant.”

Sarah Wunsch, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney, agrees, and had filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Corneau. “When a woman becomes pregnant,” Wunsch said, “she does not give up her constitutional rights to privacy and bodily integrity.”

The concerns about the Corneau case have legal precedent. In 1983, Massachusetts’ highest court overturned a lower court’s order to have a pregnant woman’s cervix sewn up against her will to prevent a miscarriage. A state trial court in 1990 found it unconstitutional to penalize a woman for using drugs during pregnancy. The same year, a Washington, D.C., court overturned a lower court’s order of a caesarean section against a woman’s will.

Fetal rights is an evolving legal area, and laws vary from state to state. Wisconsin and South Dakota are among states where pregnant women who abuse drugs or alcohol may be detained in hospitals or elsewhere. In Wisconsin, an exposed fetus is placed under the jurisdiction of Juvenile Court--the same venue where Corneau’s case has been heard.

Jetta Bernier, executive director for Massachusetts Citizens for the Children, lauded the action here. Limiting Corneau’s rights “for a period of a few weeks seems far less disturbing than denying her child’s basic right to be born in a safe and protective setting,” she said.

Still, Lynn Paltrow, director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women in New York, said “the fact that it could get this far and we could have a judicial ruling based on what in another circumstance might be considered an auditory hallucination is testament to how contested a pregnant woman’s right to bodily integrity is.”

Making a legal decision in favor of a fetus, Paltrow said, “erases the woman altogether.”

Walsh said he is puzzled by such arguments. “The only thing I was interested in is what’s best for that baby,” he said. “How this becomes actionable on behalf of all women is bizarre.”

A Boston Globe editorial concurred, observing: “This is one case, about one woman, caught up in a tragic set of circumstances that continue to threaten the life of the child she is carrying. This isn’t some slippery slope on the way to erasing women’s rights.”

With Corneau expected to deliver any day in a facility for pregnant inmates, the immediate questions may become momentarily moot. But not for long. Another member of Corneau’s sect is midway through a pregnancy of her own.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Walsh said.