Stories Of Women Becoming Mothers While Struggling With Drug Addiction

What happens when a woman with a drug addiction becomes pregnant? For some, pregnancy gives new hope, and motivation to get clean and start a new life.

This article follows several American women who became pregnant while addicted to opioids, through their pregnancy and first months after childbirth. It shows the many struggles they face that are characteristic to drug addicts: Withdrawal symptoms combined with pregnancy complications, the difficult feat of concealing their addiction from relatives and colleagues, yet revealing it to the doctors. And then, to cap it all, there's the risk of Newborn Abstinence Syndrome (NAS), a condition typical for children born to mothers with a drug addiction, when a newborn baby suffers from the withdrawal symptoms and needs to be treated with opioid drugs (and gradually weaned from them).

This situation is not only painful for children and their mothers; in some states, it can lead to imprisonment—or, in milder cases, to the family being supervised by child protection services. Not all women make it, many slip back into drug use, and yet, for many, their newborn child offers a new hope for their own lives.