This is literally a bit in Seinfeld, except its a bagel and Elaine doesn’t get to go on her work trip. Guess our collective memory is very very very short.
America’s fixation on drugs is beyond psychotic. God forbid someone actually enjoys their shitty life a little bit. When does congress get its random drug tests? Oh, that’s right, the rules don’t apply there…
If it’s how it’s being made out, I’m seriously concerned. However, it’s different if she was already on the CP radar for drug use, and her taking the baby home depended on her providing clean tests. The child needs to come first
This was my first thought. It’s sticky because unfortunately for her this is the type of thing an opiate addict would lie about.
Yep exactly. It may be a fuck up by CPS but it may be that she’s already flagged as a risk so they’ve put the child first.
As long as CPS doesn’t leave the baby to die in a hot car in the sun.
No, even if there was an existing agreement. You can’t have your kids taken away for eating healthy food.
Drug addicts don’t have less rights than the rest of us.
Eating a salad isn’t the same as endangering your child even if the test can’t tell the difference.
If she’s already been found to be a risk to her child due to substance misuse issues and she’s failed a drug test, then the child should be taken. Further analysis can be done on the sample, but in the short term the newborn needs to be safeguarded. Babies under a year are particularly at risk of death from CP issues, and the child’s needs come first.
This is exactly the arguments used to ban abortions.
If she’s already found at risk of having an abortion she should be held in a safe birthing room until she gives birth then further analysis can be done, but in the short term the fetus needs to be safeguarded…
That’s what you sound like.
Sorry mate, you can’t just take people’s children because you’re worried, even if you’re well meaning. If you want data here you go: children fare immeasurably better in abusive homes than in the child welfare system:
Turns out being with your family (regular, abusive, or adoptive) is FAR better than any other transient arrangement of care provider, almost universally, even for terrible abuse and neglect.
So I went and clicked on the study this article is written about, and it does not conclude that children going into the system are more likely to suffer abuse, or turn out worse, than those left with their abusers. It even cautions that “he point estimates are large and relatively imprecisely estimated, with only the delinquency and earnings results statistically significantly different from zero and none statistically different from the conditional mean comparison”
They also said that CS investigators who have higher rates of child removals, have higher rates of long term placement of the children, but that this is more of a function of how much work they do vs colleagues, rather than some sort of personal bias. They further say that the estimates against the median statistics for the general population are not far off from those of kids within abusive households, in terms of long term wealth, and delinquency, which they mention another paper that concludes that most of the long term affects are achieved in early childhood, so by the time the system receives them they are already statistically more likely to end up this way from the abuse already suffered.
Then also spend a portion of the study explaining how there are major problems with their study, but that is because most of the data they would need is either very difficult to get, or can only be gotten via unethical means. (laws around privacy make it difficult to get data from organizations, and solid experimental evidence would require knowingly allowing a group of children to be abused)
So this study isn’t saying what you are making it to say. Really even the article from a organization against government interventions of families is saying, which isn’t really surprising either.
The article sites 4 studies not one.
Even at that, lower earnings and higher delinquency rates are exactly the kinds of data point that shows unnecessary intervention, like taking a child from the mother over poppy seeds, which maybe you’ll remember is what we were disagreeing about, is bad for children.
It’s clear that the “take the kids from the parents and investigate later” attitude you’re recommending causes more problems than it solves, even though it’s “well meaning” at first glance.
Eating food isn’t a reason to have your kids taken away from any parent, even one who was at risk of drug abuse. This is a known problem with the tests and they should have confirmed it BEFORE acting, not taken the baby and investigated later.
There are actually 7 studies in that article, and a link to more, however this particular article was written because of the one study that was done, and cited, 3 times.
All of these studies have the same problems, and have lots of criticism about their methodology, particularly in how to get this data. One of the biggest critiques being that they studied kids in bad homes the CS decided to not take in, vs ones they did. This is how they know a child is in a bad home, but not being ethically responsible for them staying. This automatically selects for less severe cases being the stay at homes, and the more severe being the ones taken. Then there are this issues in my last comment, like their estimations being wide. There are also many more when I started finding when putting the titles of these studies into google scholar and adding critique.
Basically these studies aren’t particularly useful because the data is hard to get (privacy laws, parents not wanting to participate, retraction of participation agreements before conclusion of data gathering, etc), the different groupings are already selected based on a varying scales of abuse severity, that it would not be ethical to select groups in a different fashion, and any experimental trials would be unethical. These foundational problems also make meta research faulty from the start. While they can pose some interesting questions, they are not able to make reliable qualitative calls on kids being removed from abusive homes because the ability to conduct this research is just not there in a way it would need to be.
You’re clearly putting a lot of effort into your responses and are being respectful. I don’t think I’ve given you the same respect so far so I’ll try my best.
I agree with the nuances you brought up. I understand you feel it’s better to intervene and be safe than sorry. I see the appeal of that.
I take the opposite stance. I know that the welfare of the child is closely tied to the stress and trauma they endure. In most families that at least nominally love their children that’s related to the stress of the parents. Stressed out parents are bad parents (all else being equal). Taking a child from their parents is a big stressor, that alone will make the child’s life worse.
To me, that’s enough motivation to say that on average the damage you cause through intervention has to be less than the life improvement you gain from intervention.
That’s a hard balance to strike. It can be appealing to say that damage to 100 families is worth it to save one child from irreparable harm.
My personal ethics say that you’re only responsible for your actions. If you don’t act and something bad happens then that’s on the people who did the bad things. On the other hand, if you do act then it’s important to validate that your actions match your intentions to improve the world, using the data you have access to, as best as you can.
I know other people have a value system that compels them to act because not acting can be as much a choice as acting. This type of value system would definitely lead you to intervening more often. I have a hard time internalizing these types of value systems because they’re very problematic at large scale and at edge cases.
I can live in a world with interventionists. But it doesn’t mean I don’t feelthe damage unnecessary interventions cause such as the one in this article.
The analogy doesn’t work because we aren’t talking about forced bodily resource donation. Long term foster care benefits is different when we’re talking about a newborn, especially as they’re particularly at risk of unlawful death.
If you have a mother who was known to be a risk to children due to her substance misuse and tested positive for opiates after birth, how do you suggest the baby is safeguarded?
Apparently even if the mother is neglectful because of drugs and the men in her life are beating her and molesting the kids that’s “better” than foster care lmao
Edit: also apparently being addicted to a substance is the same as… Hiding abortions?
Why are they drug testing in the first place? Wtf?
Because if a pregnant woman is on something chemically addictive, the baby is too, and that’s important to know when delivering a baby.
OP might like to shit talk the US and try to find topics specifically to do so. But they are not wrong here.
You ought to understand liberal democracies don’t just routinely drug test their population without consent or at least clear indication of a crime and following a court order. There was a time where the US at least aspired to be in the liberal democracies club. That you guys defend this practice even on a left-leaning platform such as lemmy is seriously frightening.
Did you even read the article? She wasn’t tested without her consent. She just didn’t think the test would come back positive for opiates. The U.S. is no different from other countries: we don’t drug test people without their consent.
Jesus Christ, the caliber of commenter on this platform is seriously questionable.
The issue here is one of medical ethics.
It’s important for the doctors to know if the baby is going to suffer and possibly die from withdrawals after being born. The drug tests are important for knowing that.
However sharing that information with anyone else violates the trust with healthcare providers which results in significantly poorer health outcomes for everyone and pours gasoline on anti-intelluctual movements like antivax etc.
But why don’t they just ask the mother whether she took any medication or drugs she shouldn’t have? Given what happened in the article, the information provided by the mother would probably be more accurate anyway. Routinely not believing women is on brand, though. Again, we’re talking about women with absolutely no history of drug abuse. I’d seriously like to know how many women with no prior history of drug abuse start doing drugs just as they are getting pregnant to warrant routine testing.
Another problem with these kinds of tests is that they are not accurate enough. If you test urine samples routinely, the majority of your tests will be false positives. (Example: you test all pregnant women, 1% take drugs, the test is accurate 98% of the time. Congratulations, 2/3 of your tests are false positives.) That’s why you only do those tests if you have a suspicion based on other data and not just test everyone.
In the U.S. all healthcare professionals are “mandated reporters.” That means, if they find out about any form of child abuse while they’re on the job, they’re legally required to report it. Failing to do so can result in the loss of their professional license. Doing so is always considered an exception to confidentiality rights.
I suspect the hospital in question has a strict policy about reporting any pregnant mother who tests positive for drugs to CPS as a means of avoiding lawsuits. The problem is really with CPS systems in the U.S. They’re supposed to investigate reported instances of abuse and if it turns out there’s no cause for concern, close the case in short order; but CPS workers aren’t all of equal quality, and in my experience (I work in mental health), there’s a real problem with people who were abused as children becoming CPS workers and having a bias towards being overly suspicious of all parents. So, cases sometimes get dragged out, which ironically results in psychological harm to the children the CPS workers are supposed to be protecting.
Hospitals have no business testing for drugs without cause, which they do in the US per the article: “Hospitals across the country routinely drug test people coming in to give birth.” Screening people routinely for drugs is some police state shit.
You’re right, it doesn’t say that she didn’t consent. It also doesn’t say she did either, the article simply doesn’t address it.
However, I just cannot imagine a scenario, where someone would be consenting to a drug test without coercion, can you? Why would she? If you didn’t take drugs, there’s no benefit. If you did take drugs and you want the doctors to know, tell them. If you took drugs and you don’t want the doctors to know, you don’t consent. And that doesn’t even take into account false positives. I don’t see any conceivable reason why anyone would subject themselves to a drug test where no possible outcome would be positive for you. So, please enlighten me, how are these completely voluntary drug tests with zero benefit to the test subject so common?
Add to that, that these tests are not good enough for random testing. You have too many false positives, so you must have additional indicators of drug use to even consider them from a purely scientific perspective.
Having a baby is a cause for drug testing though.
And you think this is normal? This is police state shit. I’m so glad I don’t live in that horrible country.
Oh, I remember you. You like baiting people into arguments and shit-talking America. LOL. Get some therapy, man. Rage-baiting online is a pathetic way to deal with your feelings.
I don’t know about their rage-baiting but it’s super easy to shit talk the US and, considering how much damage they do to everyone else, is pretty understandable.
It would be if the above post was about something related to bad actions by the U.S., but it’s not. People talking shit about America here are just using this post as a way to vent their anger about other issues, which is childish.
And before anyone accuses me of anything, I’m no Trump supporter and I understand why people are angry at America right now. Still, that’s no reason to disparage the entire country as a “shithole.”
This is literally a thing that happened in the US you bootlicking tool.
The US is a shithole and it’s not going to improve with you pretending that it isn’t just because it’s a gilded shithole.
Ah, another baiter. You should get some therapy too. When another country’s politics piss you off this much, and you resort to venting your rage online, that’s a pretty good sign you have some unaddressed issues going on in your life. It’s not uncommon for people to avoid dealing with their real problems by becoming willfully preoccupied with more trivial issues that don’t really affect them, like politics.
Thinking this is normal is pathetic. Thinking America is great right now is also pathetic. Maybe when they start rounding your friends up you will finally see the light. Who am I kidding you don’t have any friends.
Child Services took “her” baby? I think you mean “OUR” baby. If you think “your” children don’t belong to the state, you haven’t been paying attention.
My dad had a story similar to this from when he worked at a bank. Someone brought in poppyseed muffins for the office, the same morning that the office got randomly selected for drug tests. The higher-ups were really confused when the entire office tested positive for opiates.
I also had a roommate fail to get a job over a poppyseed muffin.
I do think it’s kind of ridiculous that they apparently can’t tell the difference between poppy seeds and heroin. Seriously they can’t figure that out?
Heroin is made from opium poppy seeds, so, yeah, a residual small dose of heroin in your blood looks like the same opium from a serving of poppy seed muffins.
Someone knew there was a drug test and flooded the office with Poppy so they wouldn’t get caught.
That would be pretty genius/because even if they were positive for something else (not opiates) management would still be like “This whole batch of tests is totally scuffed, we can’t use it.”
Might’ve been the muffin or it might’ve been the Fentanyl Friday team building exercise. We’ll never know!
I do love Meth Mondays.
I think Weed Wednesday is the perfect mid week pick me up.
Everyone loves the energy and productivity gains from weed.
How do you think civil engineers come up with the switchback interchange?
Absolutely horrible but they should absolutely warn people about foods that can make them false positive before any drug tests.
She had a salad, an “everything” salad. Poppy seeds are just a minor everyday ingredient and it would to just not even think of them. Even knowing. Even being warned.
Warning is not enough.
No, the contrary: everyone should increase false positives to render these tests worthless.
This exact false positive has been known about for decades. It was in a Seinfeld episode.
It’s like how I just read that 300+ people were arrested at a protest (of I think 500). Either way, when is it that just everyone in town is arrested?
That’s when the share values of private prison companies go to the moon.
Or maybe we should stop drug testing people and exit the fascist fucking police state.
Happy to be corrected but if someone is operating heavy machinery or doing something you might not want them to be impaired due to drugs.
Was this woman operating heavy machinery immediately after giving birth?
The factor in common is public safety. In the case of giving birth there is a new extremely vulnerable member of the public. It’s at least reasonable that the hospital needs to know
That is such an American take. In my country there are three professions in which the employer can mandate a drugtest: train operator, pilots and captains. Everybody else is in their legal right to (and should) deny a drugtest. What you do in your spare time is none of your employers business.
Wait, bus drivers don’t get drug tested?
Nope. By law only employees within the three professions I described above have to comply when asked to take a drugs test. No other profession can be forced to take one.
That’s not to say that a bus driver driving irratically will never be tested - the police can still mandate a drugs test when suspected of DUI and you’d have to comply.
Commercial truck drivers absolutely should be on that list as should anyone in an armed guard position.
Are you insane? This whole thread is insane. The fact that you are OK with this makes this insane.
I was just covering my bases in case there was something I was missing.
Driving, taking school kids on a trip, surgeries, Mars mission, secret weapon testing, etc.
Meanwhile foster services took a baby away from a good family I know who wanted to adopt it. They gave it back to the drug addicted mother. A month later the mother ended up strung out and back in jail, and they wanted the foster family to take the baby in again.
I suspect the poppy seed story is an outlier.
Cool anecdote.
addiction in the family is a no win scenario. such difficult times for all of you, sorry. some people really do get clean but addiction is a chronic condition
Drug testing all pregnant women sounds so f*** up.
There have even been cases where they have given women pain meds before the test, then called CPS when she tested positive for those same pain meds.
According to this LA Times article, they weren’t testing everyone; they tested this woman because she skipped her prenatal visits. She did that because she lived with people who were at high risk from COVID-19. It also says she provided a urine sample voluntarily, but wasn’t told it was for drug testing.
It does seem reasonable to me that if a hospital had good reason to believe a woman was using opioids while pregnant, they would get child protective services involved. It does not seem to me that missing some appointments with as good an explanation as she gave here should be grounds to perform a drug test without the patient’s consent. Child protective services also shouldn’t be relying on a test with such poor specificity.
The problem is a shitty adjudication process with legal stakes that demand it. They blindside the accused without informed opportunity to competently defend themselves, review evidence, contest claims. The accused needs to understand the consequences at play & know when they’ll need a competent advocate or lawyer before it’s too late.
Sure, I believe society muat tke care of risky cases, probably tgis woman got really unlucky.
Anything to punish pregnant women.
More reason for women to avoid getting pregnant all together.
Probably she got unlucky, but the situation gives a bit of Handmade’s tale vibe.
Anyone who listened to the 50 minute podcast can tell us whether she fought the decision and what the outcome was? Written article had no closure. Must have closure!
It was shitty of them not to link to the proper story with transcript. Seems a link was hidden away in the share button of the podcast player.
When I was a teenager, I found out that some of the packs of poppy seeds at grocery stores had seeds that were shinier and oilier than the other grey/blue/dusty ones. And they sat in clumps, not loose seeds. Turns out there was a lot of opium on those.
Good times were had, for about 2 weeks, followed by ~10 years of bad times.
There was a guy who was jailed at Dubai Airport because he had eaten a poppy-seed bagel at Heathrow some 8 hours earlier.
How does that even happen? They do drug tests in airports now?
Just got a box of poppy seed almond muffins from Costco. Guess my whole family, kids included, would test positive for both heroin and cyanide.
WTF is a poppy seed salad?
Poppy seed dressing is available in grocery story.
How does it end?
A salad with poppy seeds in or on it. Like so.
Then she ate a salad from Costco: an “everything” chopped salad kit with poppy seeds.
Basically heroine
A female hero?
Yes… and her arch nemesis is Poppy Cock.
It’s probably in the dressing. Weird to call it poppy seed salad though.
That’s what I’m saying.
Now I’m imagining a spoon full of poppy seeds topped with tiny bits of tomatoes, carrots, and bacon bits.
Crrrrunch. Crrrrrruuunch. No. It’s good! Yummmm
Don’t breathe while eating or you’re gonna choke.
“It’s a dangerous drug”: child services, probably
I’m guessing a salad with poppy seeds sprinkled on it.
I’m guessing poppy seeds with salad sprinkled on top.
Why are they drug testing women during childbirth? What kind of fucked up shit is that?
Honestly I think it would be helpful to know if the baby might go into withdrawal but the positive test would be more of a flag to do a few rounds of neonatal abstinence scoring at set intervals after birth. I don’t see why you’d need to call CPS if the baby doesn’t significantly withdraw, since that’s the actual harm that would be done to the baby. If their NAS values are negligible obviously either the test was a false positive or mom wasn’t doing enough to actually put the baby at risk.
In some states, testing and then notifying CPS of positives is required by law. The healthcare staff hate it as much as the patients, because it does more harm than good.
They should - but only for medical reasons kept confidential. It’s important info for the doctor for the health of the kid. But not the cops.
Started to become common during the moral panic around drugs in the 80s and 90s here in the US. I don’t know how it’s legal but this country is very backwards.
Pointing out that a person has taken an illegal drug at some point is one of the top dehumanization tools of conservatives. It is a very potent catalyst when combined with non-whiteness. It has a rich history going back at least to the nixon days.
It has a rich history going back at least to the nixon days.
Before that… At least goes back to the “Reefer Madness” days
Oh yeah, and of course the underlying bigotry and tribalism goes back like all the way.
Like half the conservatives ik be sniffing their keys in the bathroom
Well sure. The Only Moral Addiction Is My Addiction, so to speak.
How common are psychedelics in the military? Some friends woul have me think its insanely common but I only know from sources outside myself in that case. Just be downing shrooms and/or acid since it’s not on drug tests.
Its…decently common. When I was at huachuca shrooms and acid would go around, there’d be a shakedown every six months at the TRADOC soldiers’ barracks . For long missions it was incredibly easy to run into Ritalin and such. No one I knew did anything like coke or heroin.
