WE HAVE LONG KNOWN that women who smoke and drink and use illegal drugs while they’re pregnant can do serious harm to their babies. Now we are beginning to understand that they can also harm their babies if they eat too much or don’t get enough of the right kinds of vitamins and minerals.

So might we, one day, see women hauled into court on child abuse charges because they spend nine months camping out at all-you-can-eat buffets or skip their folic acid or ignore their doctors’ advice?

It sounds far-fetched, and we certainly don’t expect to see such charges anytime soon, but our laws in South Carolina do nothing to prohibit such prosecutions, should some solicitor determine that he could convince a jury to convict. And that is a problem.

It might turn out to be good public policy to make it clearly illegal for pregnant women to consume alcohol or cigarettes — or even make other lifestyle choices that could damage their children. But here in South Carolina, the only state in the nation where women can be prosecuted because their babies are born with illegal drugs in their blood, we’ve never had a debate about that. And we certainly don’t have any law setting forth what is and is not illegal.

In fact, we haven’t even had a real debate about whether we want to charge women with a crime for using drugs during pregnancy. Instead, what we’ve had is a series of court rulings that looked into established child abuse and child homicide laws and decided that there was nothing to prevent those laws covering viable fetuses. And some see last week’s refusal by the U.S. Supreme Court to review our law as a green light to prosecute more women under these theories.

There are good reasons for such prosecutions. Women who take actions during their pregnancy that are known to harm children have done just as much to damage those children as women who physically abuse them after birth.

There also are good reasons to tread carefully. Beyond the fairness question of the state’s refusal to provide adequate drug treatment facilities, there’s a very real health dilemma. Threatening them with prison time could scare some women away from seeking medical care at all, possibly with much more serious consequences to their children than even their drug use.

And there are good reasons to look at our overall policy. Illegal drug use is an easy target: It’s illegal to begin with, and the women who abuse drugs during pregnancy (or at least the ones who get caught) tend to be poor, and have little influence. But we know that alcohol use during pregnancy does more long-term damage to children than cocaine use. Cigarette use is harmful. Even overeating can doom a child to a life of chronic diseases. And the list goes on. Does it make sense to single out illegal drugs?

We’re not entirely convinced that it does. But we don’t know because we haven’t had an informed debate. All we’ve had is advocacy groups on the two sides of the abortion issue screaming about how this affects that debate, and thus needlessly complicating the issue. There are some serious public health and public policy questions that need to be addressed, so that we can decide as a state how we can best protect children. It is shameful that in the seven years since our state Supreme Court first dropped this issue in their laps, our legislators have refused to address it.