Woman lighting a marijuana joint Getty Images/Jamie Grill Less than 24 hours after being discharged from the hospital, a new mother was resting at home with her newborn baby when she got an unexpected knock on the door. The Child Protective Services (CPS) agent on the other side came as a complete surprise, as she had not been notified she was drug tested while hospitalized, nor had she been told that she tested positive for cannabis use. Like any new mother, she was terrified.
“I felt for this woman and how she must have felt so much anxiety and fear from having CPS at her door and not understanding why,” said Dr. Kara Skelton, a researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who spoke to the woman for a qualitative study on pregnant people’s experience with drug screening published in September.
“Unfortunately, this is something that’s happening in multiple places,” she told Salon in a phone interview.
One 2021 study in JAMA found as many as 7% of pregnant women in the U.S. use cannabis in pregnancy, although estimates vary and are likely underestimated because many women fear disclosing this information will get the police involved. Yet as more and more states vote to decriminalize cannabis while medical access has expanded to 38 states, other data suggests pregnant people are increasingly being prosecuted for using the drug in pregnancy. In Skelton’s study, this stigma often prevented mothers from seeking prenatal care or communicating with their provider, which is known to have negative impacts on outcomes like birthweight .
“If you criminalize them, they’re less likely to come to the medical establishment,” said Dr. Carl Hart, a researcher at Columbia University who studies the neuropharmacological effects of psychoactive drugs. “That’s the major harm that’s happening.”
Evidence suggests allegations of using substances like cannabis in pregnancy are present in the vast majority of criminal charges taken against pregnant women. In a September report from Pregnancy Justice, a reproductive rights advocacy group, nearly all cases in which women were prosecuted in pregnancy involved some form of substance use, and cannabis was the second most common […]
Pregnant people are targeted for marijuana — but harms from prohibition can be worse
