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This article reveals how law and legal interests transform medicine. Drawing on qualitative interviews with medical professionals, this study shows how providers mobilize law and engage in investigatory work as they deliver care. Using the case of drug testing pregnant patients, I examine three mechanisms by which medico-legal hybridity occurs in clinical settings. The first mechanism, clinicalization, describes how forensic tools and methods are cast in clinical terminology, effectively cloaking their forensic intent. In the second, medical professionals informally rank the riskiness of illicit substances using both medical and criminal-legal assessments. The third mechanism describes how gender, race, and class inform forensic decision-making and criminal suspicion in maternal health. The findings show that by straddling both medical and legal domains, medicine conforms to the standards and norms of neither institution while also suspending meaningful rights for patients seeking care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A policy brief is presented in which the author discusses her research concerning the decision making process of medical providers who opted to administer drug tests to pregnant patients with a history of substance abuse.