Others followed, some leaving after a short period, some staying longer. His year-old biological mother used methamphetamine, alcohol, and marijuana during her pregnancy leaving him severely exposed to drugs.
His sight and hearing were compromised; his neurological development was uncertain. He suffered from seizures. It took a year for Matthew to crawl, and about seven months after that before he could walk. And even when he could walk his muscle tone was so delayed that he needed leg braces to get around. He was slightly behind everyone, but charged through.
Now he is off the charts and doing really good. Still, the Fergusons had more love to give. On June 7, , they adopted two girls, both of whom were born exposed to methamphetamine. Then, four years ago, at thirty-four, Annie decided the time had come to be selfish — at least, selfish by her lights. She wanted a baby. Specifically, she wanted to adopt a healthy baby girl.
Annie had no interest in crack babies. The social worker persisted. But any long-term problems should be minor. And so Annie abandoned her dream of a perfect baby and adopted the only child available, Matt, and then, a year later, Serena — two pretty, mixed-race babies who sprang from bodies that had their own minimum daily requirement for crack.
Four years, six cribs and nine strollers later, Annie and her smash-happy children had endured these among other minor problems: cerebral hemorrhaging, seizures, fluid on the brain, lesions of the brain, atrophy of the brain, countless episodes of apnea arrested breathing , tremors, crumbling cartilage, not to mention weekly visits to the neurologist, pulmonary specialist, orthopedist, speech therapist, pediatrician and infant-stimulation class.
C rack damages fetuses like no other drug. With heroin, for instance, an addiction is created and the baby has to be weaned after birth. Doctors speculate that the extent of damage probably depends on the stage of pregnancy.
Some addicts say that whenever they smoke crack during the latter stages of pregnancy, the fetus kicks madly, as though in protest of being strangled. No one can predict the result of that strangulation. And the amount of damage varies wildly. But even for these luckiest cases, the long-term prospects are simply unknowable. Indeed, a heated debate on how far crack babies can go is at the center of all public discussion of their fate.
Attention must be paid! Get out your pocketbooks! A generation can be saved! Not that the pessimists are opposed to throwing big bucks at the problem. While they push for grants to study crack babies, they continually question why. For them, this is truly a lost generation, and neither love nor money is ever going to change that.
For those in the front lines, the size of the crack-baby crisis has almost overnight become mind numbing. Some studies estimate that each year in the United States, , babies are born to women who use illicit drugs during pregnancy — some form of cocaine being the primary drug all forms are harmful to the fetus; the advent of crack just made the drug more accessible.
Since between ten and twenty-five percent of pregnant women admit to using cocaine, this already-bleak estimate may be grossly understated about 4 million babies are born in the United States annually. And considering the peanut-butter-and-jelly-like affinity that crack and sex have, these numbers will doubtless just grow worse.
Writing off the ostensibly doomed is nothing new. J udith Schaffer was one of the first to suspect. A nationally known adoption specialist, Schaffer agreed in to head up a task force to increase the rate of adoption in New York City. Virtually all agreed that most of the existing programs were sound.
Schaffer kept pushing, but no one had any answers. But these babies are. Schaffer asked to see the records of some problem babies. Without exception, all had been prenatally exposed to cocaine. She decided to do some research.
But by the time I finished my research, I was convinced that crack babies were the most serious problem the city had ever faced. By the beginning of , Schaffer had pulled together a doozy of a report, loaded with depressing projections and recommendations as to what the child-welfare system could do to ease the pain. Schaffer pauses, then beams with sunny cynicism.
Nearly twenty years earlier, Schaffer had been asked by the New York City councilman Carter Burden to assess the incidence of lead poisoning among inner-city children. The link between eating lead-based paint chips and severe brain damage had only just been established, and Burden was trying to pressure Mayor John Lindsay into repairing crumbling tenements.
Schaffer did a survey of a small area in Harlem. More than half of the children had dangerously high levels of lead. When Schaffer finally asked a senior Koch aide if there were any plans to publicize her findings, the answer was no. Better not to. I f set down in the midst of a particularly bloody battle, Ira Chasnoff would doubtless later describe his experience in the friendliest possible manner — right down to the mangled corpses.
Normal conventions that cloak tragedy — the knitted brow, the hushed voice — are absent from this Chicago neonatologist. While all doctors are trained to be matter-of-fact about death and disease, Chasnoff is positively zenlike. Chasnoff thus became one of the first scientists to warn that prenatal cocaine exposure warranted serious attention. His initial studies were the very ones that warned Judith Schaffer. It was in the mid-Eighties that Chasnoff put the word out that any pregnant addict who was worried about her baby could come to his clinic.
The deal was this: Chasnoff and his staff would provide free prenatal care if the women participated in outpatient drug treatment. More and more women showed up, and from this population, Chasnoff began collecting data — both on the women and the babies they bore.
The results were overwhelming. Strokes, small head circumferences a sign of possible retardation , low birth weights and Apgar scores, a greatly increased risk of crib death — the list went on and on. To begin with, the women Chasnoff studied were addicted to cocaine, not crack. For various reasons, crack has never caught on in Chicago. While the chemistry of the drugs is, of course, the same, patterns of use are not.
Though no one has been able to link dosage to damage, common sense suggests that more cocaine is probably worse than less. Perhaps most important is the fact that by virtue of being in the program, they were getting prenatal care — a rarity for the vast majority of addicts.
She looked like a porcelain doll," Karen Drakewood, now 51, said recently in her Overbrook kitchen. She agreed to enroll her baby in the cocaine study at Einstein.
Drakewood promised herself that she would turn her life around for the sake of Jaimee and her older daughter, but she soon went back to smoking crack. Hurt arrived early at Children's Hospital one morning in June to give a talk on her team's findings to coworkers.
After nearly 25 years of studying the effects of cocaine and publishing or presenting dozens of findings, it wasn't easy to summarize it in a PowerPoint presentation. Hurt, who had taken her team from Einstein to Children's in , began her lecture with quotations from the media around the time the study began. A social worker on TV predicted that a crack baby would grow up to "have an IQ of perhaps Hurt, who is also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, is always quick to point out that cocaine can have devastating effects on pregnancy.
The drug can cause a problematic rise in a pregnant woman's blood pressure, trigger premature labor, and may be linked to a dangerous condition in which the placenta tears away from the uterine wall.
Babies born prematurely, no matter the cause, are at risk for a host of medical and developmental problems. On top of that, a parent's drug use can create a chaotic home life for a child. Hurt's study enrolled only full-term babies so the possible effects of prematurity did not skew the results. The babies were then evaluated periodically, beginning at six months and then every six or 12 months on through young adulthood.
Their mothers agreed to be tested for drug use throughout the study. The researchers consistently found no significant differences between the cocaine-exposed children and the controls. At age 4, for instance, the average IQ of the cocaine-exposed children was Both numbers are well below the average of 90 to for U. When it came to school readiness at age 6, about 25 percent of children in each group scored in the abnormal range on tests for math and letter and word recognition.
But after a time "we began to ask, 'Was there something else going on? While the cocaine-exposed children and a group of nonexposed controls performed about the same on tests, both groups lagged on developmental and intellectual measures compared to the norm.
Hurt and her team began to think the "something else" was poverty. As the children grew, the researchers did many evaluations to tease out environmental factors that could be affecting their development.
In , the couple attended a workshop led by experts at the Orange County Department of Social Services. They learned about the challenges those children often face, and the difficulties that caring for such children can wreak on many families. For a nine-week stretch, the Fergusons diligently attended foster care classes. They learned how to help children handle emotional and physical trauma.
They learned about visitation rights. They learned about child attachment issues. County officials also thoroughly interviewed the Fergusons and their two biological children, as well as family and friends. About five weeks after the last class the Fergusons became licensed foster parents. Soon after that — around 3 p. A social worker phoned Melissa and told her a 5-year-old boy and his 2-year-old sister, who had been removed from their home, were in immediate need of a foster family.
Others followed, some leaving after a short period, some staying longer. His year-old biological mother used methamphetamine, alcohol, and marijuana during her pregnancy leaving him severely exposed to drugs. His sight and hearing were compromised; his neurological development was uncertain.
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