Jade Dass thought she’d done the hard part: She’d kicked an opioid habit, thanks in part to a prescribed drug called Suboxone, which prevents withdrawal. When she got pregnant, it felt like the beginning of a new life. But then the very thing that was helping her stay sober overturned her life:
Around midnight on Jan. 31, 2021, Dass’s water broke. Bieniasz rushed them to Verde Valley Medical Center, and the baby was born 11 hours later, weighing almost seven pounds. She had her mother’s light brown skin, her father’s slightly drooping eyes and nearly perfect scores on her Apgar tests, a standard assessment of newborn health. Dass couldn’t stop staring at her daughter. “She was a part of me, like if someone took my heart and it was now separated from me and I could see it over there,” Dass told me.
Dass was still cradling her newborn an hour later when a nurse announced the baby might be transferred to another hospital if she showed signs of withdrawal. Dass was stunned. Her daughter, according to medical records, lacked any withdrawal symptoms. Both of them had been drug-tested, and the only substance in their urine was Suboxone. She was planning to breastfeed and begged the nurse not to take the baby: “She needs to be with her mother.” Dass was so upset that she barely registered what else the nurse said: They would be contacting the Department of Child Safety, Arizona’s child-welfare agency. Verde Valley, like many hospitals throughout the country, was required to report newborns exposed to substances in utero, including prescribed medications such as Suboxone.
A child-welfare report can result in little more than an assessment of a family’s circumstances and referrals to services. But other times, a report can lead to an extensive investigation. No agency tracks how many new mothers have been investigated for taking legally prescribed medications, but after sending 100 public-records requests to every state and the District of Columbia, I found thousands like Dass who have been referred to child-welfare authorities, their lives suddenly under scrutiny, their newborns sometimes placed into foster care for weeks, months or indefinitely.
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