How Much Can Drugs Harm a Baby During the First Month of Pregnancy?

Just “say no to drugs” Here is why:

Fetal Abuse
A growing number of women are being criminally prosecuted or having their children taken from them for doing drugs while pregnant.

The trend is deeply alarming to women’s rights advocates and health-care workers, who warn that such a heavy-handed approach will only deter drug-addicted mothers-to-be from seeking out prenatal care. Moreover, many warn, such tactics may be paving the way for abortion — the ultimate violation of “fetal rights” — to legally be declared murder.

“These cases represent the intersection of the war on drugs and the war on abortion,” says Lynn Paltrow, director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, who has successfully helped argue against dozens of similar prosecutions in the last decade. “There may have been a temporary lull, but the issue has not gone away.”

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, spurred by hyperventilating news stories warning of a coming deluge of “crack babies,” prosecutors in more than 30 states sought to stem the anticipated flood by charging scores of drug-using pregnant women with everything from child abuse to manslaughter. In nearly all cases, however, judges eventually threw out those prosecutions, in part because the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision had firmly established that a fetus is not a person in the eyes of the law.

But in the last year, a fresh crop of fetal-rights cases have sprung up. In April, a 26-year-old Texas woman was indicted for child endangerment after her newborn tested positive for cocaine. The same month, a Pennsylvania judge ruled that prosecutors could charge an addicted mother with child endangerment for using heroin while pregnant — even if her baby was born healthy. This spring, the Oklahoma state legislature nearly passed a bill making it a misdemeanor for pregnant drug abusers to fail to get substance-abuse treatment. And in Georgia, 21-year-old Shannon Moss is facing murder charges for allegedly killing her fetus by taking cocaine and amphetamines while pregnant.

Moreover, in recent years at least 17 states have enacted civil laws making it possible for authorities to take away the children of pregnant women who test positive for drugs. The Ohio Supreme Court may take up the issue soon. So far, hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of children have been taken from their mothers as the result of a single positive drug test, according to the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy.

The most bitter battleground, however, is South Carolina, the only state so far to have explicitly extended criminal child-abuse laws to cover fetuses. Despite directly contrary rulings in numerous other states, South Carolina’s Supreme Court declared in 1997 that drug-using pregnant women can be prosecuted criminally — and sentenced to as much as 10 years in prison.

Dozens of women have since been charged. Just last March, one woman was sentenced to three years in prison for violating her probation by “abusing” her unborn child with cocaine, and another drew a five-year suspended sentence for smoking marijuana while pregnant.

Such prosecutions were pioneered 11 years ago with the help of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, where zealous hospital officials started a program of testing pregnant women for drug use, and turning over their findings to police. The US Supreme Court will rule later this year on whether that practice violated the women’s Fourth Amendment right of protection against unreasonable searches.

Those who prosecute pregnant drug users say they have everyone’s best interests at heart. “I just want the babies to be safe,” says Tommy Pope, chief prosecutor for South Carolina’s York and Union Counties, where the two women convicted in March live. “We try to use prosecutions as a last resort. But you run into situations where a woman has had five kids, and they’ve all tested positive for crack. Where do you draw the line?”

“Unless addicts are forced to stop, they won’t,” seconds Bobby Hood, the attorney representing the city of Charleston in the Supreme Court case. The threat of prison, he maintains, “has a very good deterrent effect.”

But in fact, according to a broad range of women’s rights and major health care organizations, the threat of prison is more likely to hurt, not help, the unborn babies of drug users, by frightening drug-using mothers-to-be away from seeking prenatal care. The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and many other groups formally oppose criminal prosecutions of mothers of drug-exposed babies.

Even Daniel Kennedy , an Illinois lawyer who recently founded the incipient Fetal Rights Institute, doesn’t think criminal prosecutions are the way to go. “Fetuses are definitely children,” says Kennedy. “But jailing moms for hurting their kids prenatally doesn’t help. It will only encourage women to seek abortions, or avoid treatment.”

At least three drug treatment pr

Wow that’s pretty sad. What’s done is done though and from here on out you’re going to have to take extra care of yourself. If you did this not knowing that you were pregnant and you’re still very early on then chances are everything should be OK. It’s chronic use of drugs and alcohol during the following weeks of critical development that can cause severe development problems not to mention miscarriage. So now that you know, get on the right path, eat healthy, drink a lot of water and take prenatal vitamins. Let your dr know about the alcohol and drugs. You should be OK though.
How far along are you?