Mary Sawyer still vividly recalls the day in 1973 when she was working as a resident physician at a Dallas hospital and a child about 10 months old was brought into the emergency room with bruises on his back and abdomen.

Believing the child had been abused, Sawyer and other doctors tried to convince the state's child protective services agency to remove him from the home. The child welfare people refused and returned the child to his parents. A few days later, Sawyer said, the child was brought back to the emergency room, where he was pronounced dead.

"That child had literally been beaten to death. As someone new and young in their career, it made an indelible impression on me, and I have kind of made a career out of trying to keep it from happening again," said Sawyer of Emory University Hospital, who works in the emergency room at Grady Memorial Hospital on weekends.

Had doctors in that Texas ER been able to take temporary protective custody of that child, Sawyer believes he might have been saved. But Texas had no such law then. Nor does it have one now. Neither does Georgia. That's why Sawyer is among doctors pushing the Georgia General Assembly to enact what has become known as the Terrell Peterson Bill. The legislation, Senate Bill 315, would give doctors the authority to take temporary protective custody of a child they suspect has been abused.

The bill has been approved by the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on civil and criminal practices and will be considered by the full committee this afternoon. The bill appears to have no serious opposition, and its sponsors believe it will receive favorable treatment from the full General Assembly.

The bill is named after the 5-year-old Atlanta boy who died in January 1998 after eight reports had been made to Fulton County Department of Family and Children Services alleging that Terrell and his siblings had been abused or neglected. His grandmother, aunt and the aunt's boyfriend have been charged in Terrell's slaying.

Terrell's case was brought to light in a series of articles in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution documenting flaws in the state's child protective services system. Since then the GBI, at the direction of Gov. Roy Barnes, has launched an investigation into Terrell's death and the deaths of 12 other youngsters whose families had been reported for possible abuse or neglect.

The bill's primary sponsor is Sen. Nadine Thomas (D-Ellenwood), a registered nurse, who has spoken passionately about the need for it during committee hearings the last few weeks.

"I'm really looking at this as a safety net and an extra layer of protection so a child is not sent home like Terrell was," Thomas said.

Under current Georgia law, only law enforcement officers are permitted to take a child into temporary protective custody without an order from the juvenile court. The provisions of SB 315 would give doctors that same right, allowing them 24 hours to hold the child for assessment and treatment before notifying the juvenile court of the action that had been taken and requesting a hearing on the placement of the child.

Sawyer said the law is needed because police officers who are not trained in child abuse often disagree with emergency room doctors about the severity of injuries to a child.

"Things that seem minor to other people are major to us. That's because of where the bruises are," Sawyer said.

Uniformed officers whose job is traffic enforcement or "getting drunks off the street," often the first responders to a doctor's 911 calls once they suspect abuse, Sawyer said, "don't know about bruises on babies."

The bill is modeled after similar laws in Iowa and Illinois. Exactly how many states have such laws is not known, according to Christy Kennedy of the National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information. A 1985 study showed 26 states allowed doctors to take temporary custody of children they suspect had been abused, but there has been no follow-up study, Kennedy said, and it is not known if other states have passed such laws.

Both the Iowa and Illinois laws have been in effect 20 years and have proven valuable in protecting children, according to officials in those states.

"Physicians have responded well and have used it judiciously," said Rosemary Norlin, child protection program manager for the Iowa Department of Human Services.

One of the concerns raised by Georgia legislators is how often doctors might take a child into protective custody.

Norlin said doctors usually take action only in the most egregious cases and do it so infrequently the state does not even track the number of times it is done.

Randell Alexander, director of the Center for Child Abuse at Morehouse School of Medicine, worked in Iowa 14 years and said he used the law only four or five times.

"But I was a child abuse specialist. Most physicians never used it," Alexander said

Ed Cotton, deputy director of the Division of Child Protection in the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, said the cases in which doctors take protective custody "are generally serious and they are generally done by an emergency room doctor."

In Illinois, which also permits child protective service workers to take temporary custody of children who are victims of suspected abuse, officials said that in fiscal year 1998, of 6,698 children taken into protective custody, 167 were done by doctors. In fiscal year 1999, of 6,462 children taken into protective custody, 129 were done by doctors.

Doctors in Georgia are split on the necessity of such a law, said William Clark, associate general counsel of the Medical Association of Georgia, a statewide organization of physicians.

"Pediatricians and emergency room doctors are all for it," said Clark. The concerns, he said, are about safety and come from doctors in private practice and what would happen if they tried to take a child into protective custody in their offices against the will of the parents.

Norlin and Cotton said in those cases in their states, the doctor would refer the child to a hospital for additional treatment, and the protective custody would be taken there. In some cases where severe abuse is apparent, the doctor would likely order the child transferred to the hospital by ambulance.

"I don't ever recall hearing of a doctor doing it in his private office," Cotton said.

The bill exempts doctors and hospitals from liability if they act in good faith and remove the child, or even if they don't take the child into protective custody, and something happens to the child.

Alexander said the law is just one step in revamping Georgia's flawed child protective services system.

"We were never proposing this to be a major step in preventing child abuse," he said. "This would help only in a few select cases. It's a small step, but you've got to start somewhere."

Alexander, from Morehouse, said that in the wake of revelations about Terrell Peterson, the atmosphere among the public and in state government appears conducive to getting the law passed.