It’s been pretty much accepted since the 80’s that cocaine causes birth defects. A number of rulings, even Supreme Court rulings, back this up. There have even been pregnant women convicted of child abuse for using cocaine while pregnant, even though the baby ended up not having any birth defects.
But a report from the Lindesmith Center says cocaine may not cause birth defects at all. If it doesn’t, there’s a lot of laws and court decisions that should probably be rethought. Does anyone have any good info (with sources), besides my link above, on whether cocaine is causally linked to birth defects or not?
Your Quadell
P.S. This isn’t a debate on whether drugs are bad, or whether they should be legal, etc. I just want the medical facts.
The understanding that I have is that crack babies don’t so much have birth defects - like missing limbs or cleft palates - but rather hard-to-pin-down deficiences of one type or another.
They tend to be very sensitive to stimuli, extremely difficult to comfort, and don’t develop at the same pace as healthy babies. I’ve read that the incidence of ADD, ADHD, and other learning disabilities is much higher in crack babies.
No idea what the statistics are, but I’ll see if I can’t dig up a few.
It’s always been my understanding that so-called “crack babies” are subject to an overall weakening of the immune system as a symptom of withdrawl. They are born addicts and once the umbilical is severed they are going cold turkey, so to speak. Any truth to this at all?
stoli
Well, blessed is just about everyone with a vested interest in the status quo,
as far as I can tell.
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by quadell:
…a report…says cocaine may not cause birth defects at all. If it doesn’t, there’s a lot of laws and court decisions that should probably be rethought.
Your Quadell
Well, if this is any new indication: the LSD babies are called Yuppies and Boomers — not defects.
I’m sorry that I don’t have any stats for you, I can only relate a personal experience. Ten years ago I was a volunteer at MCG in Augusta, Georgia, and LOVED rocking the babies. But, the drug addicted ones were SO hard to deal with, you couldn’t comfort them, they wouldn’t suck on the bottles. They were usually a great deal smaller than the other infants, and because of the feeding problems they were intravenously fed, so you had to try to walk with them (most didn’t like being rocked) pulling the pole with the feeding packets attached. The twitching, and jerking of their little limbs was pitiful to see.
The are birth defects are irrelevent to the child abuse issue. The issue is the mother knowingly exposing her unborn child to toxic chemicals that could cause serious medical problems and/or death.
I understand what you’re saying, Anti Pro, and that could be because of the effects of crack. But there are two other possible explanations as well.
First, the Lindesmith article said mothers who smoke crack are much more likely to smoke cigarettes, abuse alcohol, eat nutritionally inadequite food, and live in houses with lead paint. All of these factors also can lead to low birth weight etc. A good study would weed these factors out.
Second, to quote Lindesmith,
So expectation has a lot to do with it as well.
I just wish there were better, more scientific studies given! Again, if anyone knows of any. . .
My dad knows a lady who’s a teacher in a very rough area of Detroit. She says that the crack children (formerly crack babies) tend to have very short attention spans and behaviorally are alot harder to control than non-exposed children.
–It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
I recall reading a report debunking the idea of crack babies at least two years ago, so this is not new information. I don’t want to downplay how stupid it is to use cocaine when pregnant, but it’s also a bad idea to drink, to smoke, to not go for prenatal visits at a doctor, to get bad nutrition, and in general to be poor when pregnant.
A friend of mine e-mailed me some recent journal abstracts on the subject. Not surprisingly, some say one thing and some say another, but the most credible one (a meta-analysis of 14 studies from the past 15 years) shows very little effect, when other factors are held constant.
Here, then, is an excerpt from that abstract.
There were several others, but I don’t know how much space to take up with this post. Generally, the larger the study, the more negligible the difference between exposed and non-exposed infants. The only one that showed marked difference between the two groups was not a double-blind test.
Notably, one study measured cognitive and social skills of 3-5 year old children, and found no difference between those whose parents had “heavy use” and those who had “no use” of cocaine while the schild was in utero, after taking other factors into account. This would lead credence to the idea that any effects that exist are not long-term.
But I still wouldn’t smoke crack if I were pregnant.
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Originally posted by quadell:
**…There have even been pregnant women convicted of child abuse for using cocaine while pregnant, even though the baby ended up not having any birth defects.
We know that thalidamide, diethylstilbestrol (DES), and scores of other abusive formulas for foods and pharmaceuticals do casue birth defects. Any convictions?
