GIST: "Baltimore County resident Elizabeth Eden was in labor when her doctor informed her that she’d tested positive for opiates. “I
said, ‘Well, can you test me again? And I ate a poppy seed bagel this
morning for breakfast,’ and she said, ‘No, you’ve been reported to the
state,’” she told WBAL TV. This
began Eden’s horrific saga this April, when she gave birth to her
daughter Beatrice. Thanks to the drug test, the newborn was kept in the
hospital for five days after her birth, and Eden was assigned a
caseworker to check up on her at home. “It was traumatizing,” Eden told WBAL TV. A positive test for opiates is 300 nanograms per milliliter of blood at St. Joseph Medical Center, where Beatrice was born. Studies show that eating poppy seeds or pastries containing poppy seeds can produce opiate blood levels much higher than that. Aside
from the freakish nature of this one case, Eden’s tribulations points
to the larger issue of testing new mothers for drugs in American
hospitals. In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled
that involuntary testing of pregnant women for drugs was a violation of
the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. But
many cities and states have some regulations about screening new mothers
and infants for opiates as a precaution against neonatal abstinence
syndrome, the dangerous withdrawal that babies who have been exposed to
opiates experience. One of the central debates around this screening is
whether it should be “risk-based” or universal. With “risk-based”
testing, “you are making a lot of assumptions and it tends to unfairly
target low-income women,” gynecology professor Jessica Young told the American Association for Clinical Chemistry in 2016. But universal testing raises the risk of false positives, like in Eden’s case. Young
also warned about the possibility of false positives. “Urine drug
testing can be a useful tool. However, because of the importance of
patient consent and false positives, it is important that there be
appropriate consent processes in place, as well as confirmatory
results,” Young said. According to a report from ProPublica, substance abuse during pregnancy is only criminalized explicitly in three states: Tennessee (which had the second highest rate of opiate prescriptions
in the country in 2016), South Carolina, and Alabama. Another 18 states
say that drug use during pregnancy is child abuse, and in three states
women who use drugs during pregnancy can be involuntarily committed to a
treatment program. In four states, testing is mandatory if drug use
during pregnancy is suspected. Women have been prosecuted for drug use
during pregnancy in 45 states, and many of them have been incarcerated. It
makes sense to protect babies from syndromes like NAS that are caused
by exposure to drugs in utero. But jailing women for their own
addictions doesn’t seem like the way to protect them or their children.
Neither does the refusal to retest false positives, like Eden
experienced. Obviously, many of these laws go hand in hand with
anti-choice rhetoric that says anything a woman does to endanger her
fetus is equivalent with child abuse or murder. The horrifying 2015 case
of Purvi Patel, who was charged with feticide and sentenced to 20 years in prison
for a miscarriage, is one example of what can happen when we go down
the slippery slope of criminalizing women for what happens inside their
own bodies."
https://splinternews.com/mandatory-drug-testing-for-new-moms-is-a-slippery-slope-1828210411
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog;
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The entire story can be read at:
https://splinternews.com/mandatory-drug-testing-for-new-moms-is-a-slippery-slope-1828210411
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog;
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