Pregnancy and Drug Use: The Facts
By combining drug war propaganda with claims of fetal rights, new and significant violations of civil liberties and human rights are occurring. In the last twenty years, hundreds of pregnant women and new mothers have been arrested, based on the argument that a pregnant woman’s drug use is a form of abuse or neglect. In 1997, the South Carolina Supreme Court held that a pregnant woman who used cocaine and who gave birth to a healthy baby could be convicted of child abuse. More recently, a pregnant woman who used cocaine and suffered a stillbirth that was caused by an infection-- has been convicted of homicide by child abuse in South Carolina. More than eighteen states now address the issue of pregnant women’s drug use in their civil child neglect laws, and a growing number of these states make it possible to remove a child based on nothing more than a single positive drug test. Like other applications of the war on drugs, the punishment of pregnant women targets vulnerable, low-income women of color—those with the least access to health care or legal defense.
These cases represent a significant expansion of the war on drugs. Pregnant women who are addicts can go to jail, despite Supreme Court rulings that treat addiction as a disease --and punishment for it as a violation of the Constitution's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Similarly, despite the fact that people who are treated for drug related health problems are supposed to have extra protections under the federal drug treatment confidentiality statute, S.C., by reinterpreting drug use as child abuse, creates a devastating exception to the statute’s privacy protections.
NAPW seeks to ensure that addiction and other health and welfare problems women face during pregnancy are addressed as health issues, not as crimes; that families are not needlessly separated, based on medical misinformation; and that pregnant and parenting women have access to a full range of reproductive health services, as well as non-punitive drug treatment services.
NAPW believes that without a comprehensive strategy to undo decades of misinformation and political posturing about pregnancy and drug use, an ever-widening circle of women will be caught in increasingly punitive, intrusive, and coercive government controls that hurt rather than help women and their families. Similarly, drug policy reform efforts to de-stigmatize drug users and to shift policies from punishment to treatment will fail if the myth of crack babies and crack mothers destroying a generation of children is left unchallenged. And, while failure to address the intersection of these issues could lead to further erosion of both drug policy reform efforts and reproductive rights, the ability to take on these issues in a coherent manner provides a unique opportunity to enlist the support of new organizations and communities in the struggle for drug policy reform, and a more just society.
In this section you will find statements from leading scientists, medical researchers, medical, public health, and child welfare organizations addressing the issues of pregnancy and drug use. You will also find articles discussing why some women use drugs during pregnancy and how stigma and misinformation not only hurt pregnant women but also their children, families, and communities.
Medical and Public Health Opinions
One Hit of Meth Enough to Cause 'News Defects'
By Barry Lester, Ph.D., Guest Commentary, JoinTogether.org, August 17, 2005
Recently (July 27, 2005), Medical News Today (MNT) carried a story with the alarming title, "Single prenatal dose of meth causes birth defects." Join Together, a prominent website, published a summary of the story with a similar headline and opening with the possibly more inflammatory, "Pregnant women who use methamphetamine even once put their unborn children at risk of birth defects" (July 29, 2005). These headlines misleadingly imply that the research involved women when it actually involved mice, and both the original story and the Join Together summary failed to mention that this animal research may have little if any bearing on the health outcome of humans prenatally exposed to methamphetamines.
Top Medical Doctors, Scientists & Specialists Urge Major Media Outlets Not to Create "Meth Baby" Myth
On July 25, 2005 more than 90 leading medical doctors, scientists, psychological researchers and treatment specialists released a public letter calling on the media to stop the use of such terms as "ice babies" and "meth babies." This prestigious group agrees that these terms lack scientific validity and should not be used.
Another "Drug Baby" Media Scare?
Do you have questions about your pregnancy and the drugs you are taking?
Motherisk is a "source for evidence-based information about the safety or risk of drugs, chemicals and disease during pregnancy and lactation." (NAPW does not, however, warrant or gaurantee the accuracy of information on this site or any other site to which NAPW links that relates to medical information, nor is this site nor any other site that NAPW links to intended to substitute for professional medical advice, to contradict medical advice given or to substitute for medical care of any kind. )
http://motherisk.org/
THE DEMON SEED THAT WASN'T: Debunking the "crack baby" myth
By: Maia Szalavitz, City Limits MONTHLY, March 2004
When four starving boys aged 19, 14, 10 and 9, were taken from their New Jersey adoptive parents last October, all were severely emaciated. The oldest was so stunted--he weighed 45 pounds and measured four feet tall--that police thought he was a grade-schooler. He had been found by neighbors, rooting through their trash for food at 2:30 a.m. He was so weak, he couldn't even open the Tastykake they hastily offered.
THEY CALLED ME A CRACK BABY. So why am I in college?
By: Antwaun Garcia, City Limits MONTHLY, March 2004
I don't know if I was born with drugs in my body or not. But my moms used drugs while she was pregnant with me. So it wasn't long before kids at school were calling me a "crack baby."
Top Medical Doctors and Scientists Urge Major Media Outlets to Stop Perpetuating “Crack Baby” Myth
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PRESS RELEASE
Signatories from Leading Hospitals and Research Institutes in US and Canada Agree That Term Lacks Scientific Basis and Is Dangerous to Children
Letter Sent to Washington Post, Arizona Republic, LA Weekly, Charleston Post and Courier, Amarillo Globe-News and Other Media Using These Terms
HIV, demanding truth about approaches that work
Because NAPW believes in evidence based medicine and policies based on science not stigma, we joined a letter addressed to Ambassador Randall Tobias, Office of the United States Global AIDS Coordinator, expressing concern about US officials who questioned the efficacy of needle exchange programs and sought to block support for needle exchange in United Nations resolutions and policy documents. As the letter explained:
Pregnant Drug Users: Scapegoats of the Reagan/Bush and Clinton Era Economics
By: Sheigla Murphy and Paloma Sales
INTRODUCTION
In this paper we present analyses of two National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded studies entitled, "An Ethnographic Study of Pregnancy and Drug Use" (Rosenbaum and Murphy 1991-94) and "An Ethnography of Victimization, Pregnancy and Drug Use," (Murphy 1995-98). Our goal is to explicate the ways in which pregnant drug users in the San Francisco Bay Area experienced, coped with and protected themselves from increasing stigmatization, abuse and punishment while enduring a period of fiscal retrenchment of government assistance programs.