Substance abuse in pregnancy: a major ethical challenge for pediatricians

This article has conceptualized substance abuse in pregnancy as a major ethical challenge for pediatricians. At the outset, it was suggested that ethics need not be a question of bad consequences, right or wrong, guilt, or fixed principles, but a question of information sought, faced, and taken into account in action. Hopefully the information contained in this issue of Pediatric Annals will shed new light on the present, thus enabling pediatricians to reconceptualize their downstream efforts on behalf of drug-exposed infants and their families as something other than futile and hopeless labor and encourage pediatricians to move further upstream and join in a public health effort to prevent substance abuse in the first place.