Caring for Drug-Exposed Babies BY MELISSA HART | ILLUSTRATIONS BY KATHERINE STREETER
ife takes us to unexpected places. Love brings us home.” The sentiment decorates a black wooden frame collaged with photos of beaming mothers, infants, and toddlers. It’s one of many family photos on the walls of Jennifer and Naomi Meyer’s spacious two-story in the west hills of Eugene. Guests at their New Year’s Eve party—early, to accommodate children’s bedtimes—sip wine and remark on the pictures. They study the inspirational refrigerator magnets and the weekly menu posted on a chalkboard with Tuesday’s “kid dinner”—cheeseburgers, mac ’n’ cheese, and carrots prepared by younger members of the household. In the living room, Katy Perry’s “Firework” pumps over the sound system. A dozen kids, toddlers to preteens, gyrate to the beat. They’re Black, Latino, Anglo, amalgamations of ethnicities. They grin and twist while their parents applaud on the sidelines. It’s an unusual gathering. Therapists, artists, academics, people who might otherwise remain unaware of each other in this mid-size city gather around one commonality—many have adopted children from the foster care system. And some of these children were born addicted or exposed to illegal drugs. BABIES BORN ADDICTED The National Center on Substance Abuse and Child Welfare estimates that in the United States, more than 400,000 infants each year are affected by prenatal alcohol or drug exposure. Oregon, a state hit especially hard by the methamphetamine epidemic, passed a game-changing law in 2006 that regulated sales of medications containing ingredients used to make the drug. Still, a 2015 report conducted by the Oregon
High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas Program found that meth use had increased. Heroin, controlled prescription drugs, and cocaine continue to threaten child and family safety as well. At any given time, about 8,500 Oregon children live in foster care, at least half of them because of parental drug addiction and resulting neglect and abuse. When a baby’s living situation is flagged as unsafe, the Department of Human Services (DHS) removes the child from its birth mother at the hospital and places it in medical foster care. Reunification with kinship family is always the goal, but biological parents in the throes of addiction or mental illness sometimes relinquish legal custody. Then, the DHS looks for a permanent placement for the child. But adoptive parents aren’t always easy to find. A baby born drug-exposed can be miserable. Often premature with scant birth-weight, she may suffer tremors, vomiting, diarrhea. She may have a defective heart or lungs, eye disorders, fluid on her brain. She may be unable to suck or swallow, in which case doctors insert a feeding tube into her stomach or down her nose. She’s given medical treatment, but not the tender affection of a parent seeing an infant for the first time. Still, these babies need adults who are committed to caring for them through fostering, therapy, medicine, and permanent adoption. SERVING CHILDREN 24–7 Erica Johnson-Garrick, BA ’99, works as a foster parent certifier for the Department of Human Services in Springfield, Oregon. As a sociology student at the University of Oregon, she interned at Sexual Assault T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N
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