Summary
U.S. hospitals are routinely drug-testing pregnant women and reporting positive results—often triggered by hospital-administered medications like morphine or benzodiazepines—to child welfare agencies.
Mistakes and misinterpretations of these tests have led to investigations, child removals, and trauma for innocent mothers.
A lack of safeguards, reliance on error-prone tests, and policies mandating automatic reporting exacerbate the problem.
Advocates and experts are calling for reform, including limiting unnecessary testing and ensuring results are reviewed before reporting, as these practices disproportionately harm mothers while failing to address actual child abuse risks.
I’m completely out of the loop here, what’s the point of testing in the first place? Maybe I’m too European for that, but this seems extremely intrusive for no reason.
Well, you see, this is in the US. So women have rights and autonomy only on paper. In practice and according to a lot of people, women, specially when pregnant, are mere objects to be treated as cattle. The drug tests are part of the quality assurance. You wouldn’t want damaged goods.
Hospitals test pregnant women for drug use so the government can take their child and put it into the “system” where predators can take advantage of them.
You don’t want drug addicts being solely responsible for a newborn baby do you? The only way to be sure that doesn’t happen is to test people.
I don’t know if the original intention was just that naïve or if it was always sinister, but it’s definitely used in discriminatory ways and does more harm than good.
How about we do something like let the doctors determine if a mother is fit rather than some machine?
Dude is presumably catching downvotes, so I want to ensure that you guys realize he was stating the given reason, and pponting out that is is absurd