She Ate a Poppy Seed Salad Just Before Giving Birth. Then They Took Her Baby Away. – Mother Jones

Horton didn’t realize that she would be drug-tested before her child’s birth. Or that the poppy seeds in her salad could trigger a positive result on a urine drug screen, the quick test that hospitals often use to check pregnant patients for illicit drugs. Many common foods and medications—from antacids to blood pressure and cold medicines—can prompt erroneous results.

If Horton had been tested under different circumstances—for example, if she was a government employee and required to be tested as part of her job—she would have been entitled to a more advanced test and to a review from a specially trained doctor to confirm the initial result.

But as a mother giving birth, Horton had no such protections. The hospital quickly reported her to child welfare, and the next day, a social worker arrived to take baby Halle into protective custody.

. . .

After a California mother had a false positive for meth and PCP, authorities took her newborn, then dispatched two sheriff’s deputies to also remove her toddler from her custody, court records show. In New York, hospital administrators refused to retract a child welfare report based on a false positive result, and instead offered the mother counseling for her trauma, according to a recording of the conversation. And when a Pennsylvania woman tested positive for opioids after eating pasta salad, the hearing officer in her case yelled at her to “buck up, get a backbone, and stop crying,” court records show. It took three months to get her newborn back from foster care.

. . .

Federal officials have known for decades that urine screens are not reliable. Poppy seeds—which come from the same plant used to make heroin—are so notorious for causing positives for opiates that last year the Department of Defense directed service members to stop eating them. At hospitals, test results often come with warnings about false positives and direct clinicians to confirm the findings with more definitive tests.

Yet state policies and many hospitals tend to treat drug screens as unassailable evidence of illicit use, The Marshall Project found. Hospitals across the country routinely report cases to authorities without ordering confirmation tests or waiting to receive the results.

At least 27 states explicitly require hospitals to alert child welfare agencies after a positive screen or potential exposure, according to a review of state laws and policies by The Marshall Project. But, not a single state requires hospitals to confirm test results before reporting them. At least 25 states do not require child welfare workers to confirm positive test results, either.

While urine screens are cheap, the equipment needed to run a confirmation test costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, in addition to the cost of expert personnel and lab certification. Some hospitals contract out confirmation testing—a lower-cost alternative—but getting results can take days, long after many families are ready to go home.

Source: She Ate a Poppy Seed Salad Just Before Giving Birth. Then They Took Her Baby Away. – Mother Jones

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.