Doctor's opinion shouldn't carry the force of law

BOSTON — Melissa Ann Rowland's life is not a pretty picture. Even her supporters will tell you that.

"She's not the vision of a soccer mom," says one, with classic understatement. Even the photo that went around the world on the March day the Utah woman was formally accused of murdering her twin son by refusing a Caesarean section gave new meaning to the phrase "mug shot."

Rowland was born to a retarded mother, adopted as a baby, admitted to a mental hospital at 12 with "oppositional defiance disorder." She has a history of mental illness, illegal drug use and accusations of child abuse and . . . well, you get the picture. Not a pretty one.

Indeed, the first reports claimed that she had resisted the C-section out of vanity, telling a nurse she did not want to be cut "from breast bone to pubic bone." The prosecutor accused her of "depraved indifference to human life."

But sometimes you have to step back from the single portrait to see the entire legal landscape. You see, if Melissa Ann Rowland can be prosecuted for murder, it's not just a tale of her own troubled life. It presents all of us with a sober question: Must every pregnant woman follow her doctor's orders?

Rowland denies that it was vanity that kept her from the knife. She denies "indifference," depraved or not. Nevertheless, in the days since this story came onto the national radar screen, it's been cast in the fixed-in-cement language of the abortion debate. As sides line up, this case has become another example of the rights of the woman versus the rights of a fetus.

But widen the lens and consider Amber Marlowe, for example. In January, this mother also refused to have a C-section. A Pennsylvania hospital got a court order to perform the operation. But after she and her husband fled to another hospital, she delivered the baby normally.

Or widen it to include Angela Carder. In 1987, when Carder was pregnant and critically ill with cancer, the doctors in her Washington hospital got a court order to try to save her fetus. Mother and fetus died in surgery.

The landscape is dotted with such attempts by the state to overrule the power of the mother to make health decisions for herself and her fetus.

I know that pregnancy comes these days with an expanding list of dos and don'ts. No to liquor and smoking. Yes to vitamins and folic acid. Good cheese and bad cheese. It's what women expect when they're expecting. Those who are careful look angrily at those they regard as careless.