Not The Onion

12525 readers

797 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

Links to news stories from...
...credible sources, with...
...their original headlines, that...
...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

kescusay@lemmy.world

532

Hospitals gave patients meds during childbirth, then reported them for illicit drug use (www.usatoday.com)

submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world

54 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Amairani Salinas was 32 weeks pregnant with her fourth child in 2023 when doctors at a Texas hospital discovered that her baby no longer had a heartbeat. As they prepped her for an emergency cesarean section, they gave her midazolam, a benzodiazepine commonly prescribed to keep patients calm. A day later, the grieving mother was cradling her stillborn daughter when a social worker stopped by her room to deliver another devastating blow: Salinas was being reported to child welfare authorities

What happened to Salinas and Villanueva are far from isolated incidents. Across the country, hospitals are dispensing medications to patients in labor, only to report them to child welfare authorities when they or their newborns test positive for those very same substances on subsequent drug tests, an investigation by The Marshall Project and Reveal has found.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Darrell_Winfield@lemmy.world 23 points 6 days ago

Lol, yeah, that started reason doesn't hold up well. Your basic urine drug screen (UDS) will flag benzos (midazolam in this article), natural opiates (not fentanyl and those derivatives), cocaine, barbiturates, marijuana, amphetamines, and I think that's it. The only ones likely to cause fetal withdrawal are benzos and opiates. Works well enough for benzos, but withdrawals are pretty rare. The most common are opiates, but the most common opiates won't show up on the UDS. So why use it?