New Debate Over Addicted Mothers and Their Babies

This week, the New York Times ran a piece focused on the babies of women addicted to prescription painkillers. The focus of the narrative – almost exclusively on the babies, with a lack of real interrogation of or accountability for how the system currently fails and demonizes addicted pregnant women – should be familiar to anyone who witnessed media coverage of the “crack baby” in the 1980s.*
In fact, the writer explicitly draws this parallel by stating, “Like the cocaine-exposed babies of the 1980s, those born dependent on prescription opiates — narcotics that contain opium or its derivatives — are entering a world in which little is known about the long-term effects on their development.”
The same paper ran a piece in December 2009, “The E...