by Brian Shilhavy, Health Impact News:
The Marshall Project, a “nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system,” just published an investigative report about a topic I have written about for the past decade, which is that States can take your baby away from you anytime they want based simply on a drug test, even if that drug test is false.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
She Ate a Poppy Seed Salad Just Before Giving Birth. Then They Took Her Baby Away.
Hospitals use drug tests that return false positives from poppy seed bagels, decongestants and Zantac. Yet newborns are being taken from parents based on the results.
Susan Horton had been a stay-at-home mom for almost 20 years, and now — pregnant with her fifth child — she felt a hard-won confidence in herself as a mother.
Then she ate a salad from Costco.
It was her final meal before going to Kaiser Permanente hospital in Santa Rosa, in northern California, to give birth in August 2022. It had been an exhausting pregnancy.
Her family had just moved houses, and Horton was still breastfeeding her toddler. Because of her teenage son’s heart condition, she remained wary of COVID-19 and avoided crowded places, even doctor’s offices.
Now, already experiencing the clawing pangs of contractions, she pulled out a frozen pizza and a salad with creamy everything dressing, savoring the hush that fell over the house, the satisfying crunch of the poppy seeds as she ate.
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.
The morning after Horton delivered her daughter, a nurse told her she had tested positive for opiates. Horton was shocked. She hadn’t requested an epidural or any narcotic pain medication during labor — she didn’t even like taking Advil.
“You’re sure it was mine?” she asked the nurse.
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. (Source.)
And if you are tempted to think that this was all just an honest mistake made possible by too much bureaucracy, and that this could never happen intentionally, I will remind you that this is the same county in California, Sonoma County, where a foster and adoptive parent was just sentenced to six consecutive life sentences in prison last week for torturing, starving, raping and sodomizing his three foster children, whom he kept hidden from the public for 10 years, with the help of the Sonoma County Family, Youth and Children’s Services (FYCS). See:
California Foster Father Sentenced to 6 Life Terms in Child Sex Trafficking Case: Hid Children for 10 Years Where They Were Chained, Raped, Tortured, and Starved
The Marshall Project investigation does a good job showing how widespread and common this problem is of taking babies away from parents on false drug tests.
For decades, state and federal laws have required hospitals across the country to identify newborns affected by drugs in the womb and to refer such cases to child protective services for possible investigation. To comply, hospitals often use urine drug screens that are inexpensive (as little as $10 per test), simple to administer (the patient pees in a cup), and provide results within minutes.
But urine drug screens are easily misinterpreted and often wrong, with false positive rates as high as 50%, according to some studies. Without confirmation testing and additional review, false positive results can lead hospitals to wrongly accuse parents of illicit drug use and report babies to child welfare agencies — which may separate newborns from their families, an investigation by The Marshall Project and Reveal has found.
It’s unclear how many of the nation’s 3.6 million births every year involve drug testing, but health care experts said urine screening is ubiquitous. Tens of thousands of infants are reported annually to authorities for in utero drug exposure, with no guarantee that the underlying tests are accurate, our analysis of federal data shows.
To report this story, The Marshall Project interviewed dozens of patients, medical providers, toxicologists and other experts, and collected information on more than 50 mothers in 22 states who faced reports and investigations over positive drug tests that were likely wrong. We also pored over thousands of pages of policy documents from every state child welfare agency in the country.
Problems with drug screens are well known, especially in workplace testing. But there’s been little investigation of how easily false positives can occur inside labor and delivery units, and how quickly families can get trapped inside a system of surveillance and punishment.
Hospitals reported women for positive drug tests after they ate everything bagels and lemon poppy seed muffins, or used medications including the acid reducer Zantac, the antidepressant Zoloft and labetalol, one of the most commonly prescribed blood pressure treatments for pregnant women.
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.
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 parents often lack protections, most of the caseworkers who investigate them are entitled to confirmation testing and a review if they test positive for drugs on the job, our analysis found.
Even when a doctor refutes a positive result and vouches for their patient, hospitals may report the incorrect data anyway to child welfare agencies.
“It’s almost like a gut punch. You come to the hospital and you see a social work note on your patient’s chart,”
said Dr. Yashica Robinson, an OB/GYN in Huntsville, Alabama, who has tried and failed several times to halt child welfare reports and investigations of patients with false positive results.
“Once that ball is rolling, it’s hard to stop it,” Robinson said.
No government agency collects comprehensive data on false positive results or how many pregnant patients are tested. And confidentiality laws that shield medical and child welfare records make it difficult for the public to understand how many families are affected.
In 2016, Congress mandated states to submit the number of “substance-affected” infants to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Not all states track every case, but from fiscal years 2018 through 2022, medical professionals reported at least 170,000 infants to child welfare agencies for exposure to substances, according to an analysis by The Marshall Project.
In 2022 alone, more than 35,000 such cases were reported, and authorities removed more than 6,000 infants from their families, our analysis found.
The harms of drug testing fall disproportionately on low-income, Black, Hispanic and Native American women, who studies have found are more likely to be tested when they give birth, more likely to be investigated, and less likely to reunite with their children after they’ve been removed.
But the false-positive cases The Marshall Project identified include parents of all socioeconomic classes and occupations — from a lawyer to a school librarian to a nurse who drug tests other people for a living.
“People should be concerned,” said Dr. Stephen Patrick, a leading neonatal researcher who chairs the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta.
“This could happen to any one of us.”
Indeed, not only “could” this happen to any one of us, it DOES happen, all the time, and we have documented numerous cases where this has happened over the past decade.
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