Opioid dependence and pregnancy in early twentieth-century America

Research on Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome has prompted discussion over how to ensure best outcomes for pregnant women who use drugs and for drug-dependent newborns. Before Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome and the 1980s panic of "crack babies," turn-of-the-century American medical journals discussed infants born to drug-using mothers. This paper aimed to determine whether women who used drugs while pregnant in early twentieth-century America were subject to the stigma many face today.

Records from early twentieth century medical journals, narcotic maintenance clinics, prisons that held drug users, and conferences on narcotics were examined. Dr. Charles Terry's outspokenness on drug addiction and pregnancy merited closer examination of his work, particularly The Opium Problem.

Some physicians saw drug-dependent newborns as scientific proof that addiction was a physiological disease and not subject to questions of morality. This theory was discarded in the 1920s. In that decade, beliefs that children born to drug-using parents threatened national well-being proliferated. Following formal medicine's retreat from addiction treatment, research on drug addiction and pregnancy fell into obscurity until decades later.

The precedent that women who use drugs while pregnant deserve humane treatment extends to the early twentieth century in the US. From 1910 to 1930, perceptions of infants of drug-using women changed from hopeful to fearful.