Idaho senators didn’t count the cost before they narrowly passed legislation to charge pregnant women with a felony if they use controlled substances.

Some considered the goal of the bill noble despite opponents who warned of dire consequences, including women remaining outside the health care loop to avoid detection as substance abusers and opting for abortions rather than incarceration. “It is a misconception that pregnant mothers will be incarcerated,” said Sen. Mike Jorgenson, R-Hayden Lake, the only North Idaho senator to support Senate Bill 1337. “The intent is not to put a bunch of young women in jail.”

That may not be the intent. But that’s what’s going to happen because demand for treatment for addiction is high already. A pregnant woman, hooked on heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine or other addictive substances has a greater chance of going to prison for up to five years on a felony charge than she does of getting help for her sickness. This bill would create a law that’s hard to enforce and add a new category of criminal to a corrections system without enough room for the ones it has. If the Senate really wants to do something about the problem, it should provide more money for treatment, not incarceration.

Unfortunately, crime bills are often a simple approach to a complex problem, drafted and passed by lawmakers who want to be tough on crime. But they want to be tough on the cheap, passing costs along to the cities and counties to enforce the new laws and onto the state prison system to house the new inmates.

In this case, lawmakers contend that SB 1337 will push hooked young women toward treatment.

This notion was contradicted by a Hauser Lake woman who wrote to a Spokesman-Review Web site to say that she was raising her two grandchildren for her drug-addicted daughter. “I can’t imagine anything that would keep her from using,” the grandmother said.

For a bill that purports to address substance abuse problems among pregnant women, SB 1337 doesn’t target such major health problems as alcohol or cigarette smoke. But that’s just as well. A young mother-to-be who has too much to drink one night – or has a problem with alcohol – shouldn’t have to worry about jail or the cost of defending herself in court. Or the stigma that would be caused by having a felony on her record.

SB 1337 has been around in various forms since 1991 when then-Gov. Cecil Andrus and then-Attorney General Larry EchoHawk proposed penalties for drug-using mothers-to-be. The Senate killed that bill. In 1996, a coalition of nurses, women’s advocates and civil libertarians persuaded the House Judiciary Committee to kill a similar bill that included a prison term of up to 10 years for a woman whose baby tested positive for drugs.

The argument used then by the Idaho Nurses Association executive director should be considered now when SB 1337 moves to the House: The prospect of incarceration could drive drug-addicted women underground, discouraging them from seeking prenatal care or even to the point of considering an abortion.

Tough-on-crime lawmakers have no reason to feel good about this bill.