On Demand
A Womb of Her Own
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Jeanne Flavin, associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Fordham University, member of the board at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, and the author of Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women’s Reproduction in America, looks at the expanding role of the criminal justice system in women’s reproductive health.
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Seems like? You didn't actually determine why the children weren't living with their criminal mothers, chalk it up to the courts without further thought, and expect me to take you seriously... You have some good points about women's reproductive rights, but please don't detract from these with sloppy analysis.
Why shouldn't women who are drug addicts be encouraged not to reproduce?
Cigarettes are much more harmful to the fetus than cocaine.
Shouldn't women who are cigarette addicts be treated the same way?
A few years ago I had inquired at my doctor's office about the "abortion pill" ru-486. It is interesting to note that they said they were one of the few doctors in the area that offered this option because of the threat of law-suits. What happened to choice? One doesn't have to use any option that offends your moral standards but you shouldn't force that upon others. I feel that if you truly are "pro-life" and not just "pro-birth" you would show your commitment by adopting a child that another mother is not able to care for - perhaps the child was born because other options were not available to her.
Thanks.
What is this guest talking about? If you are in prison, on public assistance, addicted to drugs, etc. you should not be having children... period.
I am an attorney and former public defender in Manhattan and saw this injustice almost daily in my job. But when I was in lawschool, I remember reading a similar study from the 90's. This study, however, went further to cite evidence that women judges were yet harsher on these women then male judges. I cannot remember the article or its author, but am wondering if your guest found similar evidence.
I would remind your guest that there is a direct correlation between pregnant women who drink and fetal alcohol syndrome.
In the guest's opinion is there any point where a child should be removed from there parent's care? How bad do the parents need to be?
WHAT!
this woman is too liberal even for me!
cigarettes harm the unborn, I think we know crack is bad for the unborn!
As a woman I am appalled by Dr. Flavin's dodging of questions and refusal to acknowledge the real difficulties presented by a society trying to avoid the cost associated with children born from women who for whatever reason were incapable of providing adequate prenatal care, either because of addiction to drugs or other reasons. Society does bear a cost in these situations and therefore has an interest in intervening.
What infuriates me is that this kind of sloppy logic and refusal to address the hard questions--"leave me alone, these are *women* we are talking about!" results in much, much greater treatment of women as victims, as "less than," than the alternative of squarely addressing what is a very hard question. Stop whining and start answering.
It is intellectually dishonest to bundle the use of illicit drugs with being battered. One is a personal choice, one is not. Equating the belief that a woman is unfit to raise a child whilst on drugs with the belief that a battered woman should not be a mother makes me not want to listen to anything else that your guest has to say. It is just lazy and reductive.
If doing illegal drugs while pregnant does not make you a "bad mother" is there anything that would make you one? Is there no such thing as "bad parenting"? And I think there is a major differance between battered women and drug addicted women - they should not be treated as equivlants
As a medical student, the woman's claim that the idea that drugs, namely cocaine, do not have the potential to do serious harm to a fetus is preposterous.
That idea is not based on junk science, as quick PubMed search reveals.
This woman does not know what she's talking about, or deliberately ignores information that is readily available to her.
Another way to interpret her findings is that convicted women with children at home receive leniency compared to those with children that are not dependent on them. I think this comment about the criminal justice system punishing them and for being bad mothers is a lot more far-fetched than the idea of courts having sympathy for mothers that have children that depend on them.
The change is not going to come from condescending liberals like Jeanne Flavin.
I can't entirely agree although I empathise with anyone losing their child - we have to think about what is best for the childern - after all - the child is not able to make a choice - where as the mother is choosing
The real issue here to me is not whether the courts should be making these decisions about women and their reproductive decisions, but rather that there is absolutely no consideration in the same courts of men's reproductive decisions.
Regardless of whether we think the court is doing the "right" thing in the cases of the women, we should be critical of the extreme and detrimental inequity in that men's parenting does not come up in these same court cases...
It is good for the courts to work with women with children dependent on them. The courts have to work with compassion but also see justice done.
The prosecution's role is to see justice done, the balance is more difficult to find in these situations because justice must be done but the best interest of the children dependent on the mother is taken into consideration.
It is good to be considerate of mothers, but we shouldn't unjustly or unfairly punish women who don't have children or their children don't live with them. That is the worst kind of insult against women.
Mr. Lehrer's question to the brilliant Jeanne Flavin about pregnant woman's legal and ethical responsibilities assumed the existence of so called "crack babies." In 2004,however, the leading medical doctors, scientists and psychological researchers in the field released a public letter calling on the media to stop the use of such terms as “crack baby” and “crack addicted baby and similarly stigmatizing terms, such as “ice babies” and “meth babies.” "Throughout almost 20 years of research, none of us has identified a recognizable condition, syndrome or disorder that should be termed “crack baby.” Please see: David Lewis et. al., Physicians, Scientists to Media: Stop Using the Term "Crack Baby," (February 27, 2004) http://www.jointogether.org/news/yourturn/announcements/2004/physicians-scientists-to-stop.html
Dr. Flavin represents the worst of ivory tower ignorance. I worked for nearly a decade with substance abusers, women and men. Many of these people were sincere in their desire to be good parents; however most of the time they were incapable, even when drug free. Their children were often exposed to the most horrible things--drug dens, watching their mothers have sex for money, multiple abandonments and disappointments, etc...Yes, people with substance abuse problems deserve help and they should have the right to bear children and raise them. But, when they repeatedly fail to be able to parent, they should lose the right to raise these children and they should be strongly encouraged to not have more--and this should happen quickly before their children are completely damaged. Many sane and healthy people don't want to be foster parents or attempt to adopt these children because they know that the system will likely return them to incompetent and often abusive parents. This is after years of dealing with emotionally damaged children and birth parents who make many promises they are unable to keep. Perhaps Dr. Falvin should embark upon some research with the children of substance abusing parents. They won't be hard to find. Many of them will in fact be in programs for emotionally challenged children, substance abuse programs, and prisons.
The link that Lynn Paltrow posted is worth reading. However, it seems that the concern is more about creating a permanent stigma for children who are born to women who use drugs. It in no way implies that it's okay to smoke crack while you are pregnant.
Ms. Paltrow,
I have just reviewed the open letter you refer to, and the authors specifically object to the use of the term "crack baby" by members of the media, because (as you stated) they claim it does not represent a recognizable syndrome such as Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.
Nonetheless, that does not mean that maternal cocaine use does not harm their fetuses. While the letter you cite stated that research on the effect of cocaine on fetal development was inconclusive (and I'm not sure that the authors of this letter, who do not speak for the medical community, were justified in making this statement in 2004), research conducted since then falls firmly in support of the hypothesis of fetal harm.
Indeed, there is growing evidence from both animal and epidemiological studies that cocaine has specific effects on neurological development. One of the criticisms of the assumption that maternal cocaine use harmed fetuses was that epidemiological use had not controlled for concomitant illicit drug use. However, a study published in the Journal of Pediatrics this year, entitled "Prenatal Cocaine Exposure: Drug and Environmental Effects at 9 Years" *does* control for concomitant drug use and finds that, surprise!, cocaine exposed children "had lower perceptual reasoning IQ (M = 87.6 ± 1 vs 90.6 ± 1; F = 3.9; df = 6,355; P < .05) and a higher percentage of significant deficits" than non cocaine-exposed children. It also found a dose-response relationship.
Moreover, the fact that, until recently, scientists hadn't sorted out if it was the cocaine or the other illicit drugs that cocaine users were simultaneously using that caused fetal harm *hardly* supports "the brilliant Jeanne Flavin"'s suggestion that maternal drug use is much less harmful than we had assumed. And that was certainly the thrust of her argument--even if she was being disingenuously specific by citing a lack of evidence for "crack babies".
I think it would be a great idea for Brian Lehrer to have an on-air discussion about the crack-baby myth and the negative social consequences that resulted.
Most recent evidence-based medical research now suggests that cocaine, while not "healthy", is less harmful than smoking cigarettes during pregnancy. Even Wikipedia and popular media have reported on this.
http://www.nationalreviewofmedicine.com/issue/2005/07_30/2_feature04_13.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/03/27/tech/main282035.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_cocaine
"A report in 2001 concluded that there was insufficient evidence to determine whether prenatal exposure to crack cocaine was an independent risk factor for physical growth, cognition, language skills, motor skills, and behavior, attention, affect, and neurophysiology.[7]"
kate
of course "less harmful" is not the same as not harmful.
I worked with moms who were addicted to drugs for years, and as one previous commentator noted, most of these women love their children and want to be good mothers, but there is scarce social support out there for them--especially when women drug users are so villified. If you read the book, you will see that many of these women tried to stop using, tried to succeed in treatment, but the quality treatment programs were just not available.
Making the oversimplified assumption that just because a pregnant woman used a drug means that she will be a bad parent, and acting on that assumption by either automatically taking the child away or imposing an additional criminal justice sanction does two distinct harms: one, it harms those children who actually would be better off with her mother who, despite her drug use, is a loving, caring, and responsible parent; and two, as the author said, it punishes the woman twice.
Are we so jaded as a society that we think the best we can do is sever ties and impose severe criminal justice penalties, when what we need is to think of compassionate and creative solutions to help women be the mothers that they want to be? I, for one, have faith that we can do better by these women and their children.
AleftyinBensonhurst said that Dr. Flavin should do a study of children of drug users . . . that research is being done, especially now that the children of women who bore them during the 80s and early 90s are now young adults, and are asking why the system took them from their mothers and placed them in what was often a worse environment in foster care. Check out this quote from the forward to a report called Rebuilding Families, Reclaiming Lives issued by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU in 2006:
“Having talked to a number of children who have seen their familial fate decided by the court, this standard seems to me neither excessive nor unattainable. Here, for example, are Ahmad’s eminently reasonable suggestions for what might have been in his own best interest as a child whose mother loved him, and was addicted to drugs:
'The system, all they saw was a drug-addicted mother. “We don’t want this baby to be affected by this drug-addicted mother. The baby could do better without her.” They wanted to protect little Ahmad. Why didn’t they care
about his mother?
There are mothers out there that are abusive to their kids, so the system has to step in and do something about that. That’s understood. But when there’s a mother struggling with an addiction, struggling with herself, but is not abusive towards her kids, then the system has to help better that
situation. Help the mother as well as the child.
What would have helped me most is compassion for my mom. Services must be provided to the mom. We have to bring the mom back, so the
mom can be a mother to the child.'
Ahmad’s analysis makes clear that there is in fact only rarely a dichotomy between a child’s rights and his parent’s; that protecting a child in the majority of cases includes protecting his right to be part of his family. What would have helped me most is compassion for my mom.'"
I think women's reproduction in American, to take a page from the book title, does actually need to be better policed.
Or perhaps I should say "regulated."
But that would occur in conjunction with better social support for - not just mothers - but fathers.
Also, I think anyone who thinks "crack babies" are a myth should check out David Carr's memoir, "The Night of the Gun." The point is not that, with a lot of money, care and connections, children born to a drug-addicted mother can go on to succeed, as Carr's daughters have, to their credit.
The point is that children born to a drug-addicted mother are born with serious physical and mental deficits, AND will most likely lack the VERY COSTLY social and medical support they require to overcome these deficits.
But let's not be partisan. Whether you fall on the pro-crack or anti-crack side of the aisle, I think we can conclude that the guest must be smoking some.
At hjs from 11211 & Zach,
Liberalism does not mean unfettered permissiveness. While Liberals in general are open minded and are concerned with fairness, equality and justice with that also comes a sense of responsibility and Ms.Flavin needs to recognize this. Even if you allow that a mother (parent) taking drugs does not physically harm the developing fetus, can such a person be a responsible parent? At some point society has to intervene for the good of the child when the parent is engaging in behavior that directly leads to the creation of juvenile delinquents. While taking drugs or drinking etc. may be acceptable on an individual libertarian level, such behavior needs to be severely limited, controlled or abandoned when trusted with the responsibility of parenthood. If unable to do so then termination of parental rights should definitely be an option.
Courts across the nation have, since 1896, recognized that poverty alone is not a justification for denying someone the right to bear and raise children. Deciding an early custody dispute, an Ohio court reasoned that:
[T]he poor have as much love, as much ambition, as much morality as the richest, and American history teaches us that our best men and those who have attained the greatest eminence, have sprung from the severest poverty.
In re Olson, 3 Ohio Dec. 668, 1896 WL 1498, at *4 (Ohio Prob. Ct. 1896).
28,
I pretty much agree. On the other hand, Louis Armstrong's mother was a prostitute, who indirectly gave the world some of the happiest music on earth.
A more sober (and less criminal) Barbara Bush gave us... W., who has managed to kill thousands of American soldiers while selling our behinds to the Chinese government and trampling a near-sacred document in this country, the US Constitution.
I wholly agree that sobriety is necessary for parenting. It's just hard not to notice some glaring exceptions.
I'm a birth mother who gave her baby up five years ago because I was not in a situation or with a partner that would support me and my child. While, I'm not saying that every woman has the ability or desire to make these choices, I also question Dr. Flavin's insistence that crack, meth or cocaine addicted mothers are ok to be parents. I greatly appreciate the perpsective of "AleftyinBensonhusrt."
In making my choice for adoption with a lot of hurdles in the way, it was my daughter's well being, mental and physical health that meant the most to me. While I realize that most mothers want the best for their children, many of the addicted (from my personal experience and study) as a part of their wiring can not think past themselves. To unlearn addictive and/or abusive behavior so as to break the cycle in themselves and for their children takes time, resources, relapses and hurting many in the process. Therefore, can these people ultimately be great candidates for one of the most selfless jobs in the world?
As brutal as our system can be on women, it's aim is to break the cycle. I encourage Dr. Flavin and all of us to join the discussion in how to ultimately break the cycle of abuse and neglect in a way that both empowers women and protects the innocent.
Eva,
I can't argue with you on the W part and yes there are indeed some who manage to rise above their surroundings but unfortunately the majority do not. We definitely need a safety net and should do as much as possible to help and rehabilitate these women, but I think that sometimes intervention is required.
Of course, crack and drug dependant parental involement can be risky for children - the issue is that our policies are inconsistent, not evidence based, and not helpful to babies or their mothers. We are erratic as to which substances we condemn, we don't inquire about children at home or paternal adequacy when a violent or drug involved man shows up in the ER, and so forth. When the child welfare system removes children from parental care - and clearly sometimes that is warranted - it rarely provides them with nurturing alternatives - but often places them in abusive or neglectful situations. Since many of the drug involved mothers I have studied feel terrible about their drug use and parental function and want to do better, it would be far more productive for both the babies and their mothers to figure out how to involve them in meaningful treatment and support their efforts to become good parents.
32
I am entirely in agreement.
31
wise points, and thanks for the personal perspective. It can't have been an easy thing to give up your daughter, but you did it for the right reasons, and you have no doubt made the adoptive parents very happy. Good for you (and for your daughter and her adopted parents.)
Many of these comments serve as reminders of the enormous obstacles people like Dr. Flavin and NAPW face in their attempts to create a rational, rather than knee-jerk, conversation around the question of mothering. I applaud Dr. Flavin's questioning of our societal assumption that we (collectively) gain the right to dictate other women's moral standards as soon as they become mothers or fall below the poverty line. It seems to me that she is working to create a climate where all people's rights and dignity can be respected, and where situations that do put mothers' rights in direct conflict with their children's rights can be avoided. Is it so outrageous to ask for effective healthcare and treatment programs instead of judicial intervention?
Finally, I'm puzzled at the (widely-shared) attitude of those posters here who simply assume that Dr. Flavin, because she is an academic, must not have any hands-on, "real world" experience of the social problems about which she writes. That mindset manages to combine anti-intellectualism with snobbery (i.e., "no one who had experience of poverty or abuse could possibly be a professor") in one handy package!
#35,
I respectfully disagree with your characterization of the concerns of posters here as "knee-jerk." I suspect many of those criticizing the Professor's lack of hands-on experience have reason to do so.
There's a big difference between being an enlightened prof who discusses the idea of motherhood, and being on the front lines either as a nurse, doctor, a social worker, a teacher, an EMT worker, a paramedic, et cetera. These hands-on workers actually have to deal with the aftermath.
Also please note that what people were criticizing wasn't someone standing up for impoverished women. They were criticizing the bizarre insistence that abusing drugs has -somehow- no effect on a developing fetus.
alright, i have to put my in my 2 cents. i think dr. flavin is advocating that the rights of women should take precedence over the right of the fetus that is in her womb. the unborn is to be protected by the mother but the mother is an adult citizen of the free world is to be respected as to her decision regarding her body. she probably doesnt want the government to mandate what happens to a woman or how she is viewed should suddenly change because she is pregnant. this happens too too often like in the instance of banning partial birth abortions or reproductive rights such as access to morning after pill.
Using drugs is very different from abusing drugs. Many women face criminal justice and child custody interventions merely for testing positive for drugs, which does not prove routine use or abuse of drugs.
Additionally, occasional drug use, and even habitual drug use, as hard as it may be for many who have posted to believe, does not always result in child abuse or neglect.
The personal experiences that people have had--either themselves, or through their on-the-ground work with drug users--does not expose them to the universe of drug users, who are as different as we all are from one another. If you work in the service industry, you are necessarily going to see problem drug users because, guess what? They present with problems disproportionately as compared with drug users who experience few problems with their use.
Radical notion, but it is true.
And what the science shows, if people took the time to look, is that nutrition, poverty, depression, and other environmental factors have far more impact on a developing fetus than those drugs that our society has deemed to be illicit could ever have.
JF: "The evidence in no way, shape, or form suggests that when a woman uses an illicit drug during her pregnancy that it will result in irreversible and inevitable harm."
This is extremely disingenuous, at best.
(1)While it's true that the use of illicit drugs does not invariably lead to harm to the fetus, the latest (>2001) research makes it clear that illicit drug use (including cocaine) increases the probability of harm -- just as smoking increases the probability of getting lung cancer while, strictly speaking, does not inevitably and irreversibly cause lung cancer. Unlike the case of smoking, in the case of drug use during pregnancy, the mother increases the risk of harm to another being (or potential being) and not to herself.
(2) The question of reversibility is not the appropriate one. The harm caused by drugs to a fetus is the type of harm that leads to developmental deficits or defects. Since development is not a reversible process, neither are these deficits. Depending on their severity, they may not be debilitating or even apparent on an individual level. But, as a society, we may decide that we'd like to maximize the chance that each baby is born with a full complement of resources--including family support, nourishment, educational opportunities, AND neurological capacities.
(3) She is not qualified to evaluate the scientific evidence on the harm to babies of illicit drug use. She is qualified to determine if there's a scientific consensus on the question. However, she was not able to find the scientific consensus on the general issue of drugs of abuse and their harm to fetuses, and used an outdated lack of consensus on the effects of cocaine to argue that there was a consensus of no harm from illicit drugs.
I will grant that, as many posters have noted, that "licit" drugs like smoked tobacco and alcohol are associated with harm, even very severe harm, to the fetus. Are courts going easy on alcoholic mothers? I should hope not. But if they are it does not mean that we should go easy on pregnant women/mothers who use cocaine or other illicit drugs, but that we should be sure to do everything we can to minimize *any* maternal behavior that causes harm. Before we make other changes to the criminal justice system, Dr. Flavin has to establish that she is not dealing with a phantom menace--that the justice system is actually engaged in separating mothers from their children *unfairly*.
Finally, [38], I would like to see some sources for your claim about "what the science shows". I *have* taken the time to review the scientific literature (specifically the question of cocaine's potential to harm the fetus). New update: in research published last year in the journal cardiovascular pathology ( Cardiovasc Pathol. 2007 Sep-Oct;16(5):313-6), there is the suggestion that in utero cocaine exposure may increase an individual's risk of developing fibromuscular dysplasia. There's your syndrome. (Not that there needed to be one for harm to have taken place.) Of course, more research is required to confirm this finding; that's how science works. But, the arrow is pointing in one direction--towards fetal harm.
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