Out of curiosity, how does doctor-patient confidentiality apply to someone who's abusing illegal drugs? Can/must the doctor report that, since it's illegal, or can they only suggest "Maybe you should not do that thing"?
Also, let's not try to equate "mother is a drug-addict" with "mother might not be the best mom". Being a meth-addict doesn't mean that maybe you won't be the best mom, it means you are going to be a really shitty mom and your kid is comparatively very likely to be born in poor health and/or dead, and then mistreated until it's either removed from your custody or dies. If there's no way to legislate protection for such children without infringing upon women's rights, fine, them's the breaks. But let's not be all, "Oh ho, judge not lest ye be judged!" here.
But, again, it's already illegal to be a meth head. We don't need an extra layer of legal protection because we're already able to arrest meth addicts and treat them.
I'm not sure how patient-doctor confidentiality works as far as substance abuse & illegal drugs are concerned, but I sort-of assume the patient is still protected.
The fact that meth is illegal doesn't apply to cases where the drug of choice is legal. Like alcohol. Or percocet, which is the one relevant to this case.
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
Out of curiosity, how does doctor-patient confidentiality apply to someone who's abusing illegal drugs? Can/must the doctor report that, since it's illegal, or can they only suggest "Maybe you should not do that thing"?
Also, let's not try to equate "mother is a drug-addict" with "mother might not be the best mom". Being a meth-addict doesn't mean that maybe you won't be the best mom, it means you are going to be a really shitty mom and your kid is comparatively very likely to be born in poor health and/or dead, and then mistreated until it's either removed from your custody or dies. If there's no way to legislate protection for such children without infringing upon women's rights, fine, them's the breaks. But let's not be all, "Oh ho, judge not lest ye be judged!" here.
But, again, it's already illegal to be a meth head. We don't need an extra layer of legal protection because we're already able to arrest meth addicts and treat them.
I'm not sure how patient-doctor confidentiality works as far as substance abuse & illegal drugs are concerned, but I sort-of assume the patient is still protected.
The fact that meth is illegal doesn't apply to cases where the drug of choice is legal. Like alcohol. Or percocet, which is the one relevant to this case.
Percocet isn't relevant to this case, because the woman wasn't on it anymore.
I'm pretty sure we don't want to slip down this slope, where we start arresting people for doing things that aren't illegal. And if we want to laws to be written about how doing 'X' thing ought to result in you losing custody of a yet-to-be-born child & going to jail, we'd better be pretty damn sure that 'X' is really specific so it can't be leveraged by fundamentalists. With this case as precedent, do you think it's a good idea to start arresting pregnant women that the state suspects as being alcoholics, for example? I sure don't think that's a good idea, because I hardly doubt that we'd end-up locking-up every latino, native & black person who used mouthwash before their prenatal exam.
I hate to go there, but if the woman tested positive for cocaine use and was the wife of a very well off middle class person, would she have been treated the same way? I would think no.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
Exactly, she admitted she had a problem in the past, she couldn't afford the treatment but found a way around that, and then when she appeared clean, the state decided she was not clean enough and the future potential danger was enough to force her onto a treatment she did not want, all the while assigning a lawyer to a not person while ignoring the real person.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
Plus, y'know, this woman didn't test positive for anything other than the drug that the doctor wanted to administer to her anyway.
I don't want that point to be missed by anyone:
This woman was not an addict.
In fairness, she was illegally self medicating addictive painkillers to allegedly help kick her pain killer addiction.
It's still a fucked up situation and the silly law isn't really serving justice.
Plus, y'know, this woman didn't test positive for anything other than the drug that the doctor wanted to administer to her anyway.
I don't want that point to be missed by anyone:
This woman was not an addict.
I think you are having trouble with the definition of addict here.
Just because she hasn't taken any in 6 months, doesn't mean she's not an addict. She'll likely spend the rest of her life dealing with her addiction. You don't just get your 6 month chip and then you're cured.
That being said, I don't think in this instance the law was correctly applied.
In fairness, she was illegally self medicating addictive painkillers to allegedly help kick her pain killer addiction.
It's still a fucked up situation and the silly law isn't really serving justice.
Buprenorphine isn't a painkiller; it;s a drug almost exclusively used to ween people off of other opium drugs.
You're right that she shouldn't have been self-medicating, but she was fundamentally doing the correct thing, and in any case that was information that should've been kept between her and her doctor.
I think you are having trouble with the definition of addict here.
Just because she hasn't taken any in 6 months, doesn't mean she's not an addict. She'll likely spend the rest of her life dealing with her addiction.
This isn't true (at least not all of the time; obviously some drugs are worse than others in terms of their dependency).
Plus, y'know, this woman didn't test positive for anything other than the drug that the doctor wanted to administer to her anyway.
I don't want that point to be missed by anyone:
This woman was not an addict.
I think you are having trouble with the definition of addict here.
Just because she hasn't taken any in 6 months, doesn't mean she's not an addict. She'll likely spend the rest of her life dealing with her addiction. You don't just get your 6 month chip and then you're cured.
That being said, I don't think in this instance the law was correctly applied.
The issue with treating an addict like the state did in this case is that its basically punishing her for behavior she has not committed yet. Future crime should never be a state policy.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
...And it's also not realistic to expect that we can somehow either prevent addicts from popping-out kids or corral every addict and foster home whatever kids pop out of them.
If there was a simple way of doing that and preventing those children from growing-up to be damaged adults (probably becoming criminals themselves), we'd have solved maybe, what, 90%~ of crime? It's not feasible, which is why we haven't done it (and have instead engaged in various failed half-measures, like the war on drugs or this Wisconsin law).
...And it's also not realistic to expect that we can somehow either prevent addicts from popping-out kids or corral every addict and foster home whatever kids pop out of them.
If there was a simple way of doing that and preventing those children from growing-up to be damaged adults (probably becoming criminals themselves), we'd have solved maybe, what, 90%~ of crime? It's not feasible, which is why we haven't done it (and have instead engaged in various failed half-measures, like the war on drugs or this Wisconsin law).
I don't accept your hypothesis that nothing can be done, or your proof that surely we would have thought of it already if it could be done. Child services already deals with issues from drug addiction on a regular basis. It's by no means a perfect system, but if you say neglect to feed your child because of a drug addiction, child services can and should step in to remove the child from your custody and/or require you to seek treatment. Even in the case of perfectly legal drugs. I don't see how an unborn child would be different. If you're pregnant and are going to have the baby, then if you are discovered to be using drugs harmful to that child's health I don't see why there shouldn't be some government intervention.
Obviously there are some details you would have to think about, like the cost of a rehab program, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem. I mean the child is going to cost a shit load in healthcare anyway, so however a poor mother is getting money for that, why not add on the additional cost of a mandatory rehab program or something. The other important detail is that you would have to be very strict about what passes the bar of harmful to the child's health. Alcohol is a great example. Even talking about a single substance, small amounts are most likely fine and perhaps even beneficial, while large amounts are assuredly bad, so how do you draw the line? But I still don't see this as impossible. Child services already has to make judgment calls on a child's well being and for the most part err's very far in favor of the parents judgment.
edit - and as I've already said, none of this really applies to this particular case since the mother was not currently using. Maybe you could require more frequent checkups to ensure that relapse didn't occur, but even that I am somewhat hesitant to suggest. You absolutely, 100% should not be able to require a person to take medication.
Jebus314 on
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
...And it's also not realistic to expect that we can somehow either prevent addicts from popping-out kids or corral every addict and foster home whatever kids pop out of them.
If there was a simple way of doing that and preventing those children from growing-up to be damaged adults (probably becoming criminals themselves), we'd have solved maybe, what, 90%~ of crime? It's not feasible, which is why we haven't done it (and have instead engaged in various failed half-measures, like the war on drugs or this Wisconsin law).
The fact that our current laws suck does not mean the best means of addressing the issue is necessarily a laissez faire "Whatevs, man, nothing we can do about it!" policy. There are likely policies and programs we can implement that provide for better outcomes in these cases without trampling all over women's rights.
I will also point out, without specifically questioning the story of this one woman, that drug addicts will offer up all sorts of ridiculous stories to explain why they're magically showing up pos-tox for X. If a woman shows pos-tox for drug X and says, "Oh yeah, I was just using that to recover from drug Y, and that was my last dose, and now I'm never going to use it again," and your response is, "Oh, okay, I totes believe you," you have probably not been a doctor for very long.
Again, in this case it sounds like the woman was likely telling the truth. In general, though, if a person tests pos-tox for a certain controlled substance or illegal drug, you follow whatever protocol is for that, and more or less ignore whatever story they're telling you. Because there's a good chance their story is bullshit. (Like, there are women around here who have shown pos-tox for narcotics and had their children born pos-tox for narcotics and claimed they have never done drugs before in their life, they have no idea how that stuff got in their system.)
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I don't accept your hypothesis that nothing can be done, or your proof that surely we would have thought of it already if it could be done. Child services already deals with issues from drug addiction on a regular basis. It's by no means a perfect system, but if you say neglect to feed your child because of a drug addiction, child services can and should step in to remove the child from your custody and/or require you to seek treatment. Even in the case of perfectly legal drugs. I don't see how an unborn child would be different. If you're pregnant and are going to have the baby, then if you are discovered to be using drugs harmful to that child's health I don't see why there shouldn't be some government intervention.
Yes, and CPS is already overburdened in the U.S. (partly due to funding problems, partly due to the extreme weight of the issue they've been set to tackle). Yes, CPS can and does remove kids from abusive situations - but they necessarily use a pretty narrow scope.
I don't accept your hypothesis that nothing can be done, or your proof that surely we would have thought of it already if it could be done. Child services already deals with issues from drug addiction on a regular basis. It's by no means a perfect system, but if you say neglect to feed your child because of a drug addiction, child services can and should step in to remove the child from your custody and/or require you to seek treatment. Even in the case of perfectly legal drugs. I don't see how an unborn child would be different. If you're pregnant and are going to have the baby, then if you are discovered to be using drugs harmful to that child's health I don't see why there shouldn't be some government intervention.
Yes, and CPS is already overburdened in the U.S. (partly due to funding problems, partly due to the extreme weight of the issue they've been set to tackle). Yes, CPS can and does remove kids from abusive situations - but they necessarily use a pretty narrow scope.
And I am 100% behind everything you said there. Nothing about those problems indicates why it would be a net negative to implement some sort of standard of care for unborn fetus. fetuses? fetii? At the same time I can also see where any law in this realm could very, very easily be used as a pro-life vehicle, which is a valid concern. But I still think a real world law could exist today that takes some effort to curtail the effects of drug abuse during pregnancy with government intervention.
As a side note, I'm not sure how confirmed the net harm is for most drugs used during pregnancies. I mean getting black out drunk every other night is pretty clearly bad, but I thought I read somewhere that even like regular cocaine use didn't have any statistically relevant long term effects. Like crack babies was a complete myth.
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
El Salvador has one of the toughest anti-abortion laws in the world. A side-effect is that women who suffer miscarriages or stillbirths are sometimes suspected of inducing an abortion - and can even be jailed for murder.
Glenda Xiomara Cruz was crippled by abdominal pain and heavy bleeding in the early hours of 30 October 2012. The 19-year-old from Puerto El Triunfo, eastern El Salvador, went to the nearest public hospital where doctors said she had lost her baby.
It was the first she knew about the pregnancy as her menstrual cycle was unbroken, her weight practically unchanged, and a pregnancy test in May 2012 had been negative.
Four days later she was charged with aggravated murder - intentionally murdering the 38-to-42 week foetus - at a court hearing she was too sick to attend. The hospital had reported her to the police for a suspected abortion.
After two emergency operations and three weeks in hospital she was moved to Ilopango women's prison on the outskirts of the capital San Salvador. Then last month she was sentenced to 10 years in jail, the judge ruling that she should have saved the baby's life.
Her lawyer, Dennis Munoz Estanley, says the legal system has an inbuilt "presumption of guilt" making it hard for women to prove their innocence.
"She is yet another innocent victim of our unjust and discriminatory legal system which jails poor, young women who suffer obstetric complications for murder on the most flimsy evidence," he says.
Xiomara's father describes the conviction as a "terrible injustice".
He testified in court that his daughter had endured years of domestic violence at the hands of her partner. And yet the prosecution - which sought a 50-year jail term - relied heavily on this man's allegation that she had intentionally killed the foetus.
Xiomara has not seen her four-year-old daughter since the miscarriage.
El Salvador is one of five countries with a total ban on abortion, along with Nicaragua, Chile, Honduras and Dominican Republic. Since 1998, the law has allowed no exceptions - even if a woman is raped, her life is at risk or the foetus is severely deformed.
More than 200 women were reported to the police between 2000 and 2011, of whom 129 were prosecuted and 49 convicted - 26 for murder (with sentences of 12 to 35 years) and 23 for abortion, according to research by Citizens' Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion. Seven more have been convicted since 2012.
The study underlines that these women are overwhelmingly poor, unmarried and poorly educated - and they are usually denounced by public hospital staff. Not a single criminal case originated from the private health sector where thousands of abortions are believed to take place annually.
Munoz has worked with 29 of the incarcerated women, helping secure the early release of eight. "Only one intentionally induced an abortion, the other 28 suffered natural obstetric complications but were jailed for murder without any direct evidence," he says.
Last year when Maria Teresa Rivera suffered a miscarriage, she was sentenced to 40 years in jail for aggravated murder.
Like Xiomara, Teresa, 28, had no pregnancy symptoms before sudden severe pain and bleeding, and was reported to police by the public hospital where she had sought emergency help.
The scientific evidence was flimsy, according to Munoz who will soon lodge an appeal, and the prosecution relied heavily on a colleague of hers, who testified that Rivera had said she "might be" pregnant a full 11 months before the miscarriage.
A textile factory worker, she was the family's only breadwinner and her eight-year-old son is now living in dire poverty with his grandmother.
Cristina Quintanilla's story is different. On 24 October 2004, the 18-year-old from rural San Miguel was seven months pregnant with her second child, living with her mother in the capital to be near a hospital for the birth.
Her boyfriend was working in the US, but the couple were excited, buying baby clothes and saving food tokens.
"Around midnight I felt an immense pain, I thought I was dying," Quintanilla says.
"I was banging on the bathroom door to get my mum's attention when I felt the baby drop out. The next thing I remember is waking up in hospital."
Her mother called the police - a typical step for Salvadorans in an emergency, who took them to hospital.
Quintanilla was given an anaesthetic, and interrogated when she came round. Then she was handcuffed to the hospital bed, charged with manslaughter and transferred to a police cell.
The first judge dismissed the case, but the prosecution appealed, upgrading the charge to aggravated murder.
Quintanilla was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years in jail, where she was vilified as a child killer. Her son Daniel, then only four, spent four years living with his great-grandmother until Munoz succeeded in having the sentence reduced to three years.
"The medical reports couldn't explain why the baby died, but the prosecutor made me out to be a criminal who could have saved my baby even though I had passed out in pain," she says.
"I will never understand why they did this to me, I lost four years of my life and still don't know why I lost my baby."
Morena Herrera from Citizens' Association for the Decriminalization of Abortion says these cases have had a chilling effect, with many pregnant poor women who suffer miscarriages or complications during pregnancy "too afraid to seek medical help".
"I would be terrified to go a public hospital as there is no benefit of doubt given to young women, we are presumed guilty and jailed," says Bessy Ramirez, 27, from San Salvador.
"We cannot even rely on health staff to put their prejudices aside and treat us confidentially."
The strict abortion law has other serious human rights implications.
Suicide was the most common cause of death in 2011 among 10-to-19-year-old girls, half of whom were pregnant, according to Health Ministry figures.
It was also the third most common cause of maternal mortality.
Earlier this year, the plight of lupus sufferer Beatriz, 22, attracted international condemnation after the Supreme Court refused to authorise an abortion, even though her life was at risk and the foetus too deformed to be viable.
Beatriz's health deteriorated while the court deliberated for several months. She gave birth at 27 weeks. The baby died within hours.
Individual members of the current FMLN government, particularly Health Minister Maria Isabel Rodriguez, criticised the abortion law during the controversy over Beatriz's case. But the government has made no attempt to repeal or relax the law since coming to power in 2009, as it remains popular with large parts of the conservative population, who revere the Church and pro-life religious groups such as Si a la Vida (Yes to Life).
The Arena Party, which is strongly allied with the Church, is favourite to win next year's General Election.
But Esther Major, Amnesty International's El Salvador expert, describes the country's abortion law as "cruel and discriminatory".
"Women and girls end up in prison for being unwilling, or simply tragically unable, to carry the pregnancy to term," she says.
"It makes seeking hospital treatment for complications during pregnancy, including a miscarriage, a dangerous lottery.
"It cannot be in the interests of society to criminalise women and girls in this way."
The fact that this actually occurs somewhere is horrifying, and each step on the way towards this, especially in a place like the United States is disturbing.
...And it's also not realistic to expect that we can somehow either prevent addicts from popping-out kids or corral every addict and foster home whatever kids pop out of them.
If there was a simple way of doing that and preventing those children from growing-up to be damaged adults (probably becoming criminals themselves), we'd have solved maybe, what, 90%~ of crime? It's not feasible, which is why we haven't done it (and have instead engaged in various failed half-measures, like the war on drugs or this Wisconsin law).
I don't accept your hypothesis that nothing can be done, or your proof that surely we would have thought of it already if it could be done. Child services already deals with issues from drug addiction on a regular basis. It's by no means a perfect system, but if you say neglect to feed your child because of a drug addiction, child services can and should step in to remove the child from your custody and/or require you to seek treatment. Even in the case of perfectly legal drugs. I don't see how an unborn child would be different. If you're pregnant and are going to have the baby, then if you are discovered to be using drugs harmful to that child's health I don't see why there shouldn't be some government intervention.
I am skeptical that we can do to protect fetuses that does not have a side-effect of doing even worse harm to women's rights. Like, saving five fetuses and preventing a hundred women from having abortions and harassing a bunch of women who had miscarriages isn't really a net gain.
I am all for doing things that will help women (and fetuses) without resulting in actual legal punishment, like rehab or counseling.
As to the long-term effects of drug use, it's not a myth. For starters, you can wind up with children who are actually born addicted to the drug in question and has to be immediately subjected to detox. It increases the odds of preterm labor or miscarriage. It results in congenital anomalies. It may not be something that happens every time a mother shoots up during pregnancy, but I field a lot of cases where prenatal substance abuse is a direct or contributing cause of death, not even getting into how many children are messed up yet survive.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
...And it's also not realistic to expect that we can somehow either prevent addicts from popping-out kids or corral every addict and foster home whatever kids pop out of them.
If there was a simple way of doing that and preventing those children from growing-up to be damaged adults (probably becoming criminals themselves), we'd have solved maybe, what, 90%~ of crime? It's not feasible, which is why we haven't done it (and have instead engaged in various failed half-measures, like the war on drugs or this Wisconsin law).
I don't accept your hypothesis that nothing can be done, or your proof that surely we would have thought of it already if it could be done. Child services already deals with issues from drug addiction on a regular basis. It's by no means a perfect system, but if you say neglect to feed your child because of a drug addiction, child services can and should step in to remove the child from your custody and/or require you to seek treatment. Even in the case of perfectly legal drugs. I don't see how an unborn child would be different. If you're pregnant and are going to have the baby, then if you are discovered to be using drugs harmful to that child's health I don't see why there shouldn't be some government intervention.
Obviously there are some details you would have to think about, like the cost of a rehab program, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem. I mean the child is going to cost a shit load in healthcare anyway, so however a poor mother is getting money for that, why not add on the additional cost of a mandatory rehab program or something. The other important detail is that you would have to be very strict about what passes the bar of harmful to the child's health. Alcohol is a great example. Even talking about a single substance, small amounts are most likely fine and perhaps even beneficial, while large amounts are assuredly bad, so how do you draw the line? But I still don't see this as impossible. Child services already has to make judgment calls on a child's well being and for the most part err's very far in favor of the parents judgment.
edit - and as I've already said, none of this really applies to this particular case since the mother was not currently using. Maybe you could require more frequent checkups to ensure that relapse didn't occur, but even that I am somewhat hesitant to suggest. You absolutely, 100% should not be able to require a person to take medication.
The reason not to get child services involved is that civilised countries have decided that the woman's rights to security of her person supercede any considerations of fetus. Child services can get involved after the birth but anyone who tries to imprison a woman in mandatory rehab out anything else can fuck right off.
Also, most drugs are barely harmful anyway. Coke is pretty bad, and so is alcohol, but apart from a few weeks of withdrawal opiods have no longterm effects. Halluconogens are probably safe as well.
The fact that our current laws suck does not mean the best means of addressing the issue is necessarily a laissez faire "Whatevs, man, nothing we can do about it!" policy. There are likely policies and programs we can implement that provide for better outcomes in these cases without trampling all over women's rights.
No; in fact I don't think the current laws outside of this Wisconsin crap really do suck, honestly. The government essentially tries to take a soft-hands approach because there's a delicate balance to be reached between protecting two parties when it comes to child custody cases.
Like, if we're going to say, "Well we should have a law on the books for dealing with pregnant meth addicts, because a meth addict is always going to be a disaster for their child," I could get on board with that as a specific thing. But the more we increase the scope because, hey, these other things also might make you a bad mom, the more I get pretty hesitant. Mom smokes tobacco, mom smokes weed, mom drinks, mom drinks a lot, mom doesn't always wear her seatbelt, etc, are not good for the baby, and I have no doubt that when lawmakers start with meth addicts, they're going to want to add in at least some of these other things because, "Well it's just dumb to arbitrarily distinguish between drug addicts and alcoholics, here, look at my cherry-picked data from my lobbyist friend!"
Fetuses are not people. They have no protections and no rights over the actions of the mother, and nor should they. Your drs advice is just that, advice. If you booze it up every night while pregnant, then its terrible for the baby but you shouldn't go to jail.
Kids get rights when they are born, and not before. That's the only cutoff time that makes sense because its the only time when those rights do not impact the rights of the mother.
Fetuses are not people. They have no protections and no rights over the actions of the mother, and nor should they. Your drs advice is just that, advice. If you booze it up every night while pregnant, then its terrible for the baby but you shouldn't go to jail.
Kids get rights when they are born, and not before. That's the only cutoff time that makes sense because its the only time when those rights do not impact the rights of the mother.
Like you say, fetuses do have protections the mother allows them. The government can't strap a pregnant woman to a hospital bed and perform an abortion against her will. This isn't Communist China here.
Fetuses are not people. They have no protections and no rights over the actions of the mother, and nor should they. Your drs advice is just that, advice. If you booze it up every night while pregnant, then its terrible for the baby but you shouldn't go to jail.
Kids get rights when they are born, and not before. That's the only cutoff time that makes sense because its the only time when those rights do not impact the rights of the mother.
Like you say, fetuses do have protections the mother allows them. The government can't strap a pregnant woman to a hospital bed and perform an abortion against her will. This isn't Communist China here.
No more so than strapping anyone to a bed and performing an unwanted medical procedure on them
Posts
The fact that meth is illegal doesn't apply to cases where the drug of choice is legal. Like alcohol. Or percocet, which is the one relevant to this case.
Percocet isn't relevant to this case, because the woman wasn't on it anymore.
I'm pretty sure we don't want to slip down this slope, where we start arresting people for doing things that aren't illegal. And if we want to laws to be written about how doing 'X' thing ought to result in you losing custody of a yet-to-be-born child & going to jail, we'd better be pretty damn sure that 'X' is really specific so it can't be leveraged by fundamentalists. With this case as precedent, do you think it's a good idea to start arresting pregnant women that the state suspects as being alcoholics, for example? I sure don't think that's a good idea, because I hardly doubt that we'd end-up locking-up every latino, native & black person who used mouthwash before their prenatal exam.
pleasepaypreacher.net
I don't want that point to be missed by anyone:
This woman was not an addict.
pleasepaypreacher.net
In fairness, she was illegally self medicating addictive painkillers to allegedly help kick her pain killer addiction.
It's still a fucked up situation and the silly law isn't really serving justice.
I think you are having trouble with the definition of addict here.
Just because she hasn't taken any in 6 months, doesn't mean she's not an addict. She'll likely spend the rest of her life dealing with her addiction. You don't just get your 6 month chip and then you're cured.
That being said, I don't think in this instance the law was correctly applied.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Buprenorphine isn't a painkiller; it;s a drug almost exclusively used to ween people off of other opium drugs.
You're right that she shouldn't have been self-medicating, but she was fundamentally doing the correct thing, and in any case that was information that should've been kept between her and her doctor.
This isn't true (at least not all of the time; obviously some drugs are worse than others in terms of their dependency).
The issue with treating an addict like the state did in this case is that its basically punishing her for behavior she has not committed yet. Future crime should never be a state policy.
pleasepaypreacher.net
If there was a simple way of doing that and preventing those children from growing-up to be damaged adults (probably becoming criminals themselves), we'd have solved maybe, what, 90%~ of crime? It's not feasible, which is why we haven't done it (and have instead engaged in various failed half-measures, like the war on drugs or this Wisconsin law).
I don't accept your hypothesis that nothing can be done, or your proof that surely we would have thought of it already if it could be done. Child services already deals with issues from drug addiction on a regular basis. It's by no means a perfect system, but if you say neglect to feed your child because of a drug addiction, child services can and should step in to remove the child from your custody and/or require you to seek treatment. Even in the case of perfectly legal drugs. I don't see how an unborn child would be different. If you're pregnant and are going to have the baby, then if you are discovered to be using drugs harmful to that child's health I don't see why there shouldn't be some government intervention.
Obviously there are some details you would have to think about, like the cost of a rehab program, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem. I mean the child is going to cost a shit load in healthcare anyway, so however a poor mother is getting money for that, why not add on the additional cost of a mandatory rehab program or something. The other important detail is that you would have to be very strict about what passes the bar of harmful to the child's health. Alcohol is a great example. Even talking about a single substance, small amounts are most likely fine and perhaps even beneficial, while large amounts are assuredly bad, so how do you draw the line? But I still don't see this as impossible. Child services already has to make judgment calls on a child's well being and for the most part err's very far in favor of the parents judgment.
edit - and as I've already said, none of this really applies to this particular case since the mother was not currently using. Maybe you could require more frequent checkups to ensure that relapse didn't occur, but even that I am somewhat hesitant to suggest. You absolutely, 100% should not be able to require a person to take medication.
The fact that our current laws suck does not mean the best means of addressing the issue is necessarily a laissez faire "Whatevs, man, nothing we can do about it!" policy. There are likely policies and programs we can implement that provide for better outcomes in these cases without trampling all over women's rights.
I will also point out, without specifically questioning the story of this one woman, that drug addicts will offer up all sorts of ridiculous stories to explain why they're magically showing up pos-tox for X. If a woman shows pos-tox for drug X and says, "Oh yeah, I was just using that to recover from drug Y, and that was my last dose, and now I'm never going to use it again," and your response is, "Oh, okay, I totes believe you," you have probably not been a doctor for very long.
Again, in this case it sounds like the woman was likely telling the truth. In general, though, if a person tests pos-tox for a certain controlled substance or illegal drug, you follow whatever protocol is for that, and more or less ignore whatever story they're telling you. Because there's a good chance their story is bullshit. (Like, there are women around here who have shown pos-tox for narcotics and had their children born pos-tox for narcotics and claimed they have never done drugs before in their life, they have no idea how that stuff got in their system.)
Yes, and CPS is already overburdened in the U.S. (partly due to funding problems, partly due to the extreme weight of the issue they've been set to tackle). Yes, CPS can and does remove kids from abusive situations - but they necessarily use a pretty narrow scope.
And I am 100% behind everything you said there. Nothing about those problems indicates why it would be a net negative to implement some sort of standard of care for unborn fetus. fetuses? fetii? At the same time I can also see where any law in this realm could very, very easily be used as a pro-life vehicle, which is a valid concern. But I still think a real world law could exist today that takes some effort to curtail the effects of drug abuse during pregnancy with government intervention.
As a side note, I'm not sure how confirmed the net harm is for most drugs used during pregnancies. I mean getting black out drunk every other night is pretty clearly bad, but I thought I read somewhere that even like regular cocaine use didn't have any statistically relevant long term effects. Like crack babies was a complete myth.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24532694
The fact that this actually occurs somewhere is horrifying, and each step on the way towards this, especially in a place like the United States is disturbing.
I am skeptical that we can do to protect fetuses that does not have a side-effect of doing even worse harm to women's rights. Like, saving five fetuses and preventing a hundred women from having abortions and harassing a bunch of women who had miscarriages isn't really a net gain.
I am all for doing things that will help women (and fetuses) without resulting in actual legal punishment, like rehab or counseling.
As to the long-term effects of drug use, it's not a myth. For starters, you can wind up with children who are actually born addicted to the drug in question and has to be immediately subjected to detox. It increases the odds of preterm labor or miscarriage. It results in congenital anomalies. It may not be something that happens every time a mother shoots up during pregnancy, but I field a lot of cases where prenatal substance abuse is a direct or contributing cause of death, not even getting into how many children are messed up yet survive.
The reason not to get child services involved is that civilised countries have decided that the woman's rights to security of her person supercede any considerations of fetus. Child services can get involved after the birth but anyone who tries to imprison a woman in mandatory rehab out anything else can fuck right off.
Also, most drugs are barely harmful anyway. Coke is pretty bad, and so is alcohol, but apart from a few weeks of withdrawal opiods have no longterm effects. Halluconogens are probably safe as well.
No; in fact I don't think the current laws outside of this Wisconsin crap really do suck, honestly. The government essentially tries to take a soft-hands approach because there's a delicate balance to be reached between protecting two parties when it comes to child custody cases.
Like, if we're going to say, "Well we should have a law on the books for dealing with pregnant meth addicts, because a meth addict is always going to be a disaster for their child," I could get on board with that as a specific thing. But the more we increase the scope because, hey, these other things also might make you a bad mom, the more I get pretty hesitant. Mom smokes tobacco, mom smokes weed, mom drinks, mom drinks a lot, mom doesn't always wear her seatbelt, etc, are not good for the baby, and I have no doubt that when lawmakers start with meth addicts, they're going to want to add in at least some of these other things because, "Well it's just dumb to arbitrarily distinguish between drug addicts and alcoholics, here, look at my cherry-picked data from my lobbyist friend!"
Kids get rights when they are born, and not before. That's the only cutoff time that makes sense because its the only time when those rights do not impact the rights of the mother.
Like you say, fetuses do have protections the mother allows them. The government can't strap a pregnant woman to a hospital bed and perform an abortion against her will. This isn't Communist China here.
No more so than strapping anyone to a bed and performing an unwanted medical procedure on them