Why do doctors sometimes perform a drug test on a pregnant woman or a newborn?
asserted
doctors → perform → woman
One might think it’s because a mother under the influence might have difficulty caring for an infant, or because of potential health complications for a baby who’s been exposed to drugs or alcohol.
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who → think → drugs
No, says activist attorney Miriam Mack: It’s because drug testing “is so effective in achieving what this country has always been after, which is to maintain a social hierarchy [and] white supremacy.”
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which → say → hierarchy
Mack, senior legal counsel at the Movement for Family Power, made this assertion last month in “From the Delivery Room to the Courtroom: Evaluating and Challenging Drug Test Evidence,” a webinar for lawyers and medical professionals.
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Mack → make → lawyers
In it, she condemned our current child-welfare system (or “family separation” system, as she called it) as the modern equivalent of “chattel slavery,” Indian boarding schools and orphan trains.
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she → condemn → slavery
“Eugenics . . . continues to drive who the United States deems worthy of reproductive autonomy, dignity, family creation and integrity,” she declared.
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she → continue → autonomy
Worse is that it’s evidence that activists are still pushing the notion that drug use during pregnancy is a minor matter that should be hidden from health and child-welfare authorities.
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that → ’ → authorities
Those activists include the Pearlmutter Center for Legal Justice at Cardozo Law School and the George Soros-funded Drug Policy Alliance, the webinar’s sponsors.
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activists → include → sponsors
Speakers included Mishka Terplin of the group Doing Right by Birth, who complained about widespread false drug-test positives (due to eating a poppy-seed bagel, or an epidural administered during birth) that, she said, routinely cause a newborn’s removal from a mother’s care.
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she → include → care
Moreover, her claim that states automatically remove children to foster care after a positive drug test is fabricated.
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test → remove → care
A confirmed positive more likely results in a mother’s enrollment in addiction treatment, along with regular child-welfare check-ins.
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positive → confirm → ins
Terplin argued that our current maternal drug-testing regimen is the result of the “crack baby” panic — a “racist myth,” she claimed.
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she → argue → panic
She said concerns about maternal drug use peaked in 2003, when federal law first required health-care providers to notify authorities if a baby is born with signs of prenatal drug exposure.
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baby → say → exposure
But she skipped the fact that this concern grew from the opioid epidemic — which in 2003 was mostly affecting white families.
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which → skip → families
Indeed, a Reuters exposé that year highlighted 110 cases in which “babies and toddlers whose mothers used opioids during pregnancy . . . later died preventable deaths” — and all the children featured in the article were white.
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children → highlight → article
Each child “recovered enough to be discharged from the hospital,” the report noted.
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report → recover → hospital
“What sealed their fates was being sent home to families ill-equipped to care for them.”
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sealed → seal → them
Today, an estimated 500,000 substance-exposed infants are born every year.
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infants → estimate → ?
All of them have significantly elevated chances of experiencing abuse, neglect and death once they’re sent home.
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they → elevate → abuse
But never mind that: According to the activists, only racism can be driving infant drug tests.
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racism → mind → tests
And their behind-the-scenes advocacy has pushed hospitals and states to weaken this crucial child-safety requirement.
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advocacy → push → requirement
Mass General Brigham Hospital in Boston has discouraged medical professionals from reporting mothers who test positive to the state’s child-welfare agency.
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who → discourage → agency
In 2020, New York City’s Commission on Human Rights launched an inquiry into whether private hospitals were targeting black and Hispanic pregnant mothers and newborns for drug testing; soon after, the city’s public hospitals made such screenings voluntary.
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screenings → launch → testing
In New Mexico, a 2019 law led mothers to be regularly sent home with substance-exposed newborns without any intervention but a “voluntary plan of safe care”; in the next two years, about one baby per month died as a result of accidental poisonings, unsafe sleep deaths or other forms of abuse and neglect.
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baby → lead → abuse
It’s astonishing how quickly legalization proponents, funded by groups like the Drug Policy Alliance, shifted from arguing that drugs are a legitimate choice for adults who are hurting no one else — to fighting for a pregnant woman’s right to abuse drugs freely, with no concern about the plight of her baby.
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who → ’ → baby
But in recent months the progressive New Mexico governor who signed the state’s lax policy into law has expressed regrets.
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who → sign → regrets
“We were releasing, after they were well enough to go home, infants in the care of highly drug-addicted parents who were not required to take any service or get treatment for their addiction,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said in February.
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Grisham → release → February
“Now, I don’t know if there’s any better recipe for a disaster in America than that one.”
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I → know → one
The Aporia
