When pregnant women who abuse opioids are treated like criminals, their babies suffer
LOS ANGELES - Laws that punish women who abuse drugs during a pregnancy are often billed as a way to protect unborn babies from addiction. But new research finds they have the opposite effect: After states enact laws treating pregnant drug users as unfit mothers or criminals, the number of newborns who contend with drug withdrawal jumps significantly.
The new findings suggest that laws that criminalize a mother's drug use during pregnancy or threaten to remove newborns from their mothers' care discourage women from seeking addiction treatment and put their babies at greater risk of health problems from the moment they are born.
The study, conducted by experts at the Santa Monica-based Rand Corp., was published Wednesday in the journal
