Amairani Salinas was 32 weeks pregnant with her fourth child in 2023 when doctors at a Texas hospital discovered that her baby no longer had a heartbeat. As they prepped her for an emergency cesarean section, they gave her midazolam, a benzodiazepine commonly prescribed to keep patients calm. A day later, the grieving mother was cradling her stillborn daughter when a social worker stopped by her room to deliver another devastating blow: Salinas was being reported to child welfare authorities. A drug test had turned up traces of benzodiazepine — the very medication that staff had administered before wheeling her into surgery.
For Victoria Villanueva, pregnant with her first child, the drug detected in her baby’s system was morphine. Villanueva had arrived at an Indiana hospital at 41 weeks to have her labor induced. To ease the pain of her contractions, doctors gave her narcotics. A day later, a social worker told the new mother: The baby’s meconium — or first bowel movement — had tested positive for opiates. Now, instead of bonding with her baby, Villanueva shook with fear that her newborn could be taken away. “I didn’t even know how to function,” she recalled.
What happened to Salinas and Villanueva are far from isolated incidents. Across the country, hospitals are dispensing medications to patients in labor, only to report them to child welfare authorities when they or their newborns test positive for those very same substances on subsequent drug tests, an investigation by The Marshall Project and Reveal has found.
The positive tests are triggered by medications routinely prescribed to millions of birthing patients in the U.S. every year. The drugs include morphine or fentanyl for epidurals or other pain relief, anxiety medications, and two different blood pressure meds prescribed for C-sections.
In a time of increasing surveillance and criminalization of pregnant women since the end of Roe v. Wade, the hospital reports have prompted calls to the police, child welfare investigations and even the removal of children from their parents.
The reporting for this story included interviews with two dozen patients and medical professionals, and a review of hundreds of pages of medical and court records. Some spoke about cases on condition of anonymity because the custody of children is at stake.
In New York, a mother with no history of drug use lost custody of her toddler and newborn for five months after she tested positive for fentanyl that the hospital had given her in her epidural. In Oklahoma, when a mother tested positive for meth, sheriff’s deputies removed her newborn and three other children. They were held in foster care for 11 days, until a confirmation test proved that the culprit was a heartburn medication the hospital had given the patient.
By the time of Villanueva’s hospital stay in 2017, researchers and doctors had known for years that medications can rapidly pass from mother to baby, causing positive drug test results. Two tests from Villanueva’s prenatal visits, and another test done right before she went into labor, all showed the mother had no drugs in her system. The morphine given to Villanueva for her contractions was documented in her medical records. But the staff reported her to the state child welfare agency anyway, hospital records show.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/12/11/pregnant-hospital-drug-test-medicine
