Back in the late 1980's statements like this were very common "Theirs will be a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance and permanent inferiority." The former director of the National Center on Child Abuse called Crack Babies "a Bio-underclass".
Recently the terms "Meth Babies" and "Ice Babies" have come into vogue.
As usual, we, the public, jumped on the band-wagon. As in "If someone said it, it must be true!" Well as it turns out, it was all a giant load of Bull shit. Cocaine use by a pregnant woman does increase the chances of spontaneous miscarriage or low birth weight. But any later deficits were caused not by crack but by having Crack Heads for parents. Like malnutrition, lack of parental care and poverty. The 1985 study that started all of this was small and since then there have been many, more rigorous studies that dispute the Crack Baby myth.
A group of 96 physicians have circulated a statement proclaiming "The use of terms like "meth babies" and "crack babies" lacks scientific validity and should not be used.
2 comments:
Alcohol Fetal Syndrome. I did specialized foster care for Native American children for 10 years and I had a brother and sister who were diagnosed with that along with post traumatic stress syndrome and ADDH, all brought on by her drinking and terrorizing those little ones until the County took them away and brought them to me. When I first got them they would throw their food on the floor and get on all fours to eat like a dog. They pooped and peed wherever. Not house broken at all. When the social worker found them they were in a locked closet sleeping on heaps of trash with a dead cat. They had body lice and head lice. It was awful. They were in the locked closet because Mom was working as a prostitute in the crack house.
I had those two kids for 5 years and I offered to adopt them but Native American's have different laws because they are a sovereign people and that law was always reunite with family. I often wonder what happened to them. The day they took them from me was the day I quit foster care. It tore me apart.
I know the odds are againt them, but you never know, they may have found a way to deal with the bad hand they got in life.
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