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.
Citations Needed did an episode on the crack baby moral panic, but couldn’t find it now.
Edit: I think it was this one but I’m not entirely sure:
Citations Needed: Episode 39: From Cradle to Courtroom: How The Media Stacks the Deck Against “Defendants”
Episode webpage: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/citationsneeded/CN39_20180606_live_court_watch_nyc.mp3
Yeah, there was no crack baby epidiemic for starters…
Citations needed uses heavy sarcasm. Though I don’t recall the episode, I’m 100% they are highlighting the fact that there was not.
They talked about that, how the article that started the panic had to be retracted, but it didn’t mattered at that point
As tends to be the case with racist fearmongering.