In health class, we were taught to learn the importance of maintaining a healthy a lifestyle, how to balance alcohol with regular life, to make the right decisions, and most importantly, stay away from drugs. All across nation, many Americans are facing these issues everyday, some worse than others. Unfortunately, more pregnant women are getting more involved. It has been proven that more and more mothers are abusing and using more drugs while their pregnant. It had also been reported that mothers have a strong use for it even after the birth of their child. This problem is an on-going epidemic and it doesn't show signs of stopping.
This epidemic had first come into effect when it had swept the nation in the 80's and 90's. More and more children were being born with Prenatal Cocaine Exposure (PEC) and other opiate addictions than ever before. For those who don't know, PCE happens when a women uses cocaine and other addicting drugs while she is pregnant. By doing that, she would be exposing her unborn child to these drugs and thereby would make the baby dependent on the drug when the child is born. You would think after years of work to prevent this from spreading would help, it actually has gotten worse. According to Reuters.com, nearly 7 out of every 1,000 babies born in 2013 were diagnosed with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome, a consequence of drug dependence among newborns.
When talking about this issue, explaining the aftermath of using drugs while pregnant can make anyone feel uneasy. It's a sight that no doctor wishes to see. The NIDA (National Institute on Drug Abuse) states that drug abuse can effect babies alertness, attention and intelligence. Also, At birth, the children exposed prenatally to cocaine showed more abnormal reflexes, less motor maturity, and poorer ability to regulate their state of attentiveness than did unexposed children. The article also shares an experiment done by Dr. Gale Richardson and her colleagues. They had found an association between prenatal cocaine exposure and central nervous system deficit. For example, Richardson explains, "Cocaine has effects that are independent of other prenatal and postnatal factors. This has been true at each of the three age phases in our study--at birth, at age 1, and at age 3, the neurobehavioral effects are there". Also, at 3 years, the exposed children scored lower on an intelligence test than did unexposed children, were more restless, had shorter attention spans and less focused attention, and made more attempts to distract the examiner than did children who were not exposed to cocaine before birth.
Most mothers who use drugs or other opiates during pregnancy, are statistically shown to have tried to stop or have stopped using narcotics before and after. Reuters.com follows and explains the story of Katy Yeager, a mother of two young boys who has a long history of drug abuse before giving birth to her children. She explains that before her pregnancy she was addicted to heroin. After her boyfriend, her children's baby daddy, had been sent back to prison, Yeager claims she started using drugs more heavily because of the stress of being alone and because of the stress of an eight hour, break-free job. She goes on to say that she did try to stop while she was pregnant, but had a small 'slip-up'. After the birth of her second child, Kennedy Jade Yeager, the baby had been experiencing withdrawals from the drugs Katy had been using while pregnant. Kennedy, was experiencing uncontrollable shaking ad other forms of withdrawal.
As doctors are desperately trying to fix the problem of drug abuse among mothers, we should really be figuring out and fixing the source of this problem. Usually, teens as young as 13 are trying as abusing drugs today. Drug abuse among teens isn't as uncommon as you think. As told by dosomething.org, by the eighth grade, 28 percent of adolescents have consumed alcohol, 15% have smoked cigarettes, and 16.5 percent have used marijuana. As you can see, the rise of drug abuse amid teens isn't going away anytime soon. If we continue to tackle and attack the problem, we can prevent babies from being born dependent on drugs. We can give a child a better chance at life.
