Can U Get Ur Baby Taken Away for Peeing Positive for Marajua
The morning Crystal H.'s water broke, the medical staff at the Garnet Health Medical Center in Middletown, N.Y., collected a urine sample from her, just as they had during other prenatal appointments, co-ordinate to a lawsuit filed on her behalf concluding week. In previous visits, doctors had taken these samples to brand sure there was no blood in her urine and to bank check her poly peptide levels. Crystal, whose last name is redacted in the public filing to protect her privacy, assumed this sample was no different.
Simply the sample taken on Dec. 18, 2020, was used to screen for drugs — without Crystal's noesis and consent, court filings said. The test came back "presumptive positive" for opiates, but not because Crystal had really consumed any drugs.
She said she had eaten a bagel with poppy seeds, which sometime contain traces of morphine that tin trigger a positive consequence in a drug test.
On Friday, the New York Civil Liberties Spousal relationship (NYCLU) and National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) filed human rights complaints on behalf of Crystal and another woman, identified as Jane Doe in the complaint, confronting the Garnet Wellness Medical Center. The complaints allege that the infirmary drug-tested the women without their noesis and consent and, after false positives because of poppy seeds, alerted child welfare services.
Both women merits hospital employees denied them advisable medical care and bonding time with their children later on the false positives, including denying them the gamble to breastfeed their children.
"By drug testing me without my consent and reporting a imitation presumptive positive event to child welfare authorities, Garnet Wellness turned what should accept been the most meaningful moment of my life into the most traumatic 1," Jane Doe said in a news release from the NYCLU. "All considering I ate a salad with poppy seed dressing."
Rob Lee, a spokesman for Garnet Wellness, said the hospital was unable to comment on the lawsuit.
The allegations are an "farthermost example" of what can happen when drug tests go amiss, said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU. Simply the cases highlight larger problems with nonconsensual drug screening for significant people, which disproportionately impact pregnant people of color and low-income women, advocates say.
Gabriella Larios, an Equal Justice Works young man at the NYCLU, said hospital policies around drug screenings for pregnant people are opaque: In many cases, it is not clear whether the hospital screens every pregnant patient for drugs or screenings are washed at the discretion of the medical staff. (Garnet did not answer detailed questions near its screening policies.)
"Private hospitals are left to develop their own guidelines," Larios said. These are guidelines that many patients may exist unaware of and that may not exist applied uniformly, she added.
Allegations of drug use among pregnant people began taking off during the "fissure epidemic" in the 1980s and '90s, when some politicians and news media helped to fuel fear that the predominantly Blackness children of cocaine-addicted mothers would develop into criminals.
To this mean solar day, Black and Hispanic parents are unduly surveilled for drug use, Lieberman said, including past medical providers. "It'due south medical racism," she said.
Knowing the precise furnishings of cocaine, marijuana and opiates on significant people and infants is challenging, some doctors say.
In an article for Oregon-based Samaritan Wellness Services from 2020, Lindsey Felix, a neuropsychologist who works for the care network, said recent literature suggests that cocaine, marijuana and opiates have long-term negative consequences. Only because it is difficult to gather reliable information well-nigh illicit drug use during pregnancy, the effects of those drugs are hard to written report.
"Children who are exposed to one substance are often exposed to multiple substances," Felix said. And people who utilise these substances also take other risk factors, including low socioeconomic status and poor prenatal care.
Some studies have plant marijuana use can bear upon the developing fetus'due south brain and is linked to lower birth weight, and others accept found that opium use tin as well lead to agin outcomes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends confronting using marijuana during pregnancy, because it "may increase your baby'due south gamble of developmental issues."
Testing for these substances in pregnant people is "controversial," the American Higher of Obstetrics and Gynecology notes, and the grouping recommends that urine drug screening exist performed merely with the patient's consent.
The ACOG guidance recommends that "a positive test not be a deterrent to care, a disqualifier for coverage under publicly-funded programs, or the sole factor in determining family separation."
Policies that deny pregnant people care and access to their newborn because of positive drug tests besides contradict current medical guidance, said Emma Roth, a staff attorney at the NAPW who is representing Doe in the contempo lawsuit.
According to Doe's lawsuit, she was told by a nurse that she could non breastfeed her child, because of her presumptive positive drug test. A pediatrician later intervened, the filing said, advising that even if Doe had consumed drugs and her baby displayed symptoms of withdrawal — which was not the case — breastfeeding would "help to lessen the furnishings."
Roth pointed to inquiry that has shown that "rooming in," the practise of caring for the parent and newborn together in the same room immediately from birth, is "both rubber and beneficial for substance-exposed babies."
Arguments for separation "are actually grounded in stigma and ignore a lot of the science around prenatal drug exposure," Roth said. "A drug test is only not a parenting test."
In her complaint, Crystal, who identifies every bit Latinx, said a mostly White nursing staff accept her "accusatory and dismissive treatment" later her presumptive positive result, "ignoring her repeated requests to brand the experience of laboring more comfortable."
She said that she also was denied the chance to breastfeed and that a nurse did not support the get-go-time mother as she tried to get her baby to latch to her breast. Ii days after giving birth, she was given an electric pump and a lactation consultant, just by that time her infant could non latch, the complaint said. Crystal was never able to breastfeed her child, the complaint said.
There have been similar lawsuits in other states: Ane Maryland female parent faced what she called a "traumatizing" investigation in 2018 when a hospital reported a simulated positive after she ate poppy seeds. In Pennsylvania, two lawsuits were settled against Lawrence County afterward officials removed newborn children from their mothers' care because of failed drug tests. Both women said they ingested poppy seeds shortly before beingness screened.
Responding to criticism that drug testing policies for pregnant people are racially biased and medically unnecessary, New York City announced last year that its public hospitals would end the do of drug-testing pregnant patients without explicit written consent.
The announcement came equally the city's Commission on Human Rights opened an investigation of three private hospitals to make up one's mind whether race was a factor in who was tested and reported to kid welfare authorities, the Gothamist reported.
Black and Latino children in New York Urban center made upward 87 per centum of reports of kid neglect or corruption, even though they represent only 23 percent and 36 percent of the child population, the outlet wrote. It also reported that in 2019, 760 newborns with positive toxicology tests were reported to child welfare authorities. Afterwards an initial investigation, the city found 486 of those cases to be credible.
Merely without a statewide law barring nonconsensual drug screening, the exercise tin go on in hospitals such equally the Garnet Health Medical Center, 70 miles north of the city, Larios said.
Lieberman said it was "hypocritical" to go along to enforce secretive drug screening policies while substances such every bit marijuana are existence increasingly decriminalized throughout the country.
Even as drugs are decriminalized, Lieberman said, pregnant people remain "one of the nigh stigmatized groups in the country" when it comes to drug use. This hampers their power to get the medical support they need, she said.
Roth added that while NAPW is "incredibly supportive of the efforts to provide resources and access to care to individuals who use drugs," the "risk of being penalized" is too high. "Our event hither is with this punitive response," she said.
These policies could also weaken women'south trust in the medical organisation, causing them to turn away from necessary medical interventions outside of pregnancy, women's advocates said.
Roth said her customer was so traumatized past the feel at Garnet that she refused to seek therapy. "She lost all faith in medical providers to respect her privacy, to keep her records confidential and to be there equally a source of support for her and her babe."
Anne Branigin
Source: https://www.thelily.com/a-hospital-reported-two-new-moms-for-testing-positive-for-drugs-they-had-eaten-poppy-seeds-a-lawsuit-says/
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