The number of babies born addicted to narcotics in the United States has skyrocketed in the past decade, according to
The New England Journal of Medicine.
The quadrupling of babies born with addiction is being blamed on doctors prescribing painkillers to low-income women, according to a
report by Sky News. The women turn to street drugs, such as heroin, when they no longer have access to legal medications.
Heroin also is increasingly being used by people with higher incomes. A baby with a neo-natal addiction is born every half-hour in the United States.
Doctors at one Indiana hospital told Sky News that mothers tell them they sometimes take heroin outside the hospital before coming in to deliver.
"It's tragic – here we have a mother that's a drug addict," Dr. Paul Winchester, medical director at the St. Francis Hospital, told Sky News. "It sounds bad and so I think we struggle against a natural impulse to characterize the mother as bad and the baby as a victim."
The addicted babies show signs of withdrawal within 12-24 hours, Dr. Veronica Guilfoy, assistant director of the neonatal intensive care unit at St. Francis, said. "It's a very painful, agitating process for them, and the reality is that we have to give them that narcotic back and slowly wean them off."
Mothers such as Jessica Barnes are filled with guilt over causing their babies' addiction.
"The guilt is always going to be there, and it's something you kind of have to forgive yourself for," Barnes told Sky News.
The study found it is becoming harder to wean babies from drugs. It now takes about 19 days.
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