She Ate Poppy Seed Salad Just Before Giving Birth. Then They Took Her Baby Away | Hacker News Reader

She Ate Poppy Seed Salad Just Before Giving Birth. Then They Took Her Baby Away

motherjones.com

68 pointsstareatgoats64 comments

Seinfeld, season 6 episode 17:

Elaine takes a urine test in order to go on a work trip to Kenya with her boss, J. Peterman. She tests positive for opium. Elaine insists she has never taken drugs, but when a frantic Kramer shows up at her office begging her to let him use her normal-pressure shower, Peterman mistakes him for a drug addict and fires Elaine. Elaine realizes that the test is picking up the poppy seeds in her favorite muffins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shower_Head

When life imitates art, and art imitates life.

The DOD reciently warned service members that they should avoid eating them as well - https://media.defense.gov/2023/Feb/21/2003164614/-1/-1/1/POP...

My daughter was born with some serious issues landing her in the NICU for nearly a week two or three days after she was born. Soon after, I was pulled into a small room with a social worker, several healthcare providers (nurses and doctors) and a police officer. I was peppered with questions about what drugs my then-wife had been taking during her pregnancy. I was honestly aghast; this was a woman who spent both pregnancies puking into garbage bags she carried with her everywhere because she refused to take the anti-nausea medication she was prescribed to keep things down and other than the epidural, she refused to take even OTC painkillers or drinking caffeine of any sort (decaf or not) during her pregnancy for fear of repercussions to the babies down the line. This was on top of her STRONG aversion to even cannabis and only occasional wine drinking in what most would consider only a slight step above teetotaling.

While I can completely and utterly understand the medical profession's careful monitoring of a situation, particularly when it comes to negative birthing outcomes in the US, the first response should not be the vilification of parents until they are 1099% sure they have evidence that supports such action.

But, then again, when we had our first kiddo and she received an incorrectly inserted epidural there wasn't even a single apology from anyone, let alone the anesthesiologist who let the epidural leak into her skin, eventually puffing up the skin to a noticeable bubble, rather than where it was supposed to be, leaving her in excruciating pain to the point where I had to scream at the nurse's station for 45 straight minutes until someone would listen instead of just telling me she was fine and we were overreacting. Or the doctor who was stitching her up afterward, lacking any and all bedside manner, by saying he should have taken a before and after photo of her vagina, in front of me and my wife, because he had done such a great job.

When it came to our stay in the NICU: we were asleep in a room on another floor, our first in 40+ hours, they performed surgery on our daughter w/o asking our permission or informing us first because they attempted to call the room we were in but we didn't answer--only later to find out that the room's phone had been removed and wasn't there. No one thought to come to the room or even call the nurses' station literally next to the room to have them ask/inform us of the surgery first.

But, sure, go ahead and add on immense stress in one of the most stressful situations of our lives through false accusations while protecting your doctors to the nth degree.

Holy shit! What hospital?

Holy Shit Hospital.

Fwiw, the hospital noted in the article (not in the parent comment), is Kaiser Permanente hospital in Santa Rosa, in Northern California.

These could be fair opportunities to rightfully sue the hospital for emotional harassment and more. If you don't sue the hospital, nothing will change.

My wife was almost killed due to a botched surgery (for cancer). She felt bad for weeks afterward - and every time we returned, we were told she "just needed more time". So I finally admitted her to the ER where they declared she was in septic shock.

I inquired about suing (to some attorneys who specialize in this sort of thing) and was basically told that there was little chance of any recovery, and it would be a large burden on us to literally re-litigate the entire traumatic event. So we passed.

The trick is to settle out of court before the full case plays out in court. If they choose not to settle, you still don't have to continue with the case if you don't want to.

This sounds like something the attorneys would have suggested if they thought it was worth the time. I don't mean to be snippy, but have you done this? It's easy to make this comment online- it's a whole other thing to actually go through with it on top of all your other life stressors and reliving the trauma. I would welcome your story, so I can learn on how best to approach if there is ever a next time.

Btw, even if there is no "recovery", the doctor's insurance will still shoot up due to the judgment against the doctor, which can be a desirable outcome. If good men do nothing, the same doctor will kill someone the next time. As a motivating example, please lookup "Florida surgeon removes man’s liver instead of his spleen, causing his death". This doctor had been injuring people for a while, nothing was done, and finally he killed someone. Frankly, it seems that the attorneys you spoke to were not the right ones for the task.

The thing about trauma is that you're already reliving it. You came here to share the story which is proof of this. I understand though that life can be burdensome as it is, with no time for a difficult lawsuit.

In all honestly this looks more like swiss-cheese issue than systematic problem.

Post-op vagina pics is quite funny one, but I can see not working at that moment.

Yes, a photo of an unnaturally tightened vagina, giving the wife discomfort or outright pain during sex going forward in an effort to "make the vagina tighter for the husband", sounds fucking hilarious.

Especially since they very rarely ask if they can do it, and if they do, they ask the husband. It's surprisingly barbaric in this day and age.

Holy shit, what? Do you have anything I can read about this?

Not parent - I don’t know anyone who’s been a victim of it, but here’s some reading.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Husband_stitch

This is indeed what I was referring to. And while it's not super common, there's a number of women who self report getting them on social media.

Of course, social media is social media, but as noted in the wiki article, it's definitely still a thing.

With luck and enough sunlight as disinfectant, it will go away with the last of the doctors trained in the 50's, 60's and 70's.

I recently worked as a physician in a Labor and Delivery unit at a county hospital where there is an extremely high rate of methamphetamine and fentanyl use among patients, I would like to provide a counter-point that I have never heard of anything like this happening. Even in patients who are admitted actively withdrawing from fentanyl we go out of our way to treat them with dignity and respect. Social work will be consulted following delivery, but I have never seen police get involved, and there will never be physicians and nurses present during CPS' discussion with parents.

Again, just from what I have seen at county where substance use is a pretty banal, common occurrence and CPS often placed children in foster care straight from the newborn nursery.

I'm sorry that you had such a negative experience. Maybe it was at a hospital that doesn't deal with substance use issues much?

Sorry that happened. NICU people is harrrddd people man. Hard like people in the 'hood. Hard like people who saw combat. The death rate is high, and it's tiny babbies, the thing they love. The field as a whole can be ruthless on matters like this, and NICU is the most ruthless of them all. I doubt you can sue them, I'm sure this is something where the t's are crossed and the i's dotted. Why do you think there were X of their people in the room? Witnesses. Ever have more than one person in the room hospital-wise, they're up to something where a witness is needed for legal protections, protip. Anyway I would well be tempted to be ruthlessly passive aggressive to the related staff "oh are you having more police again today? Could you stop calling the police and perform medicine?" etc. But an actual clever thing to do here is call what's called "patient visitor relations" or similar where that depts job is to make sure everyone is getting along with everybody. If you voice your concerns to them (even now after the fact!) they might be able to get some people to say sorry (which "saying sorry" is a legal thing as in they never say "sorry I made a mistake" rather "sorry to see this strange set of circumstances occurred which were maybe, maybe not, my mistake").

Yea, lawyers ruined medicine

Federal officials have known for decades that urine screens are not reliable. Poppy seeds—which come from the same plant used to make heroin—are so notorious for causing positives for opiates that last year the Department of Defense directed service members to stop eating them.

Absolute meme country. Why do we institutionalize such stupidity?

Because it's cheaper than trying to design higher quality or more specific tests.

I agree with this. Moreso, the cost of firing/CPSing a false positive is likely negligible in the grand scale.

By selecting for efficient test taking robots at the critical gateways to the graduate level education necessary to obtain these decision-making "leadership" roles.

A comparable phenomenon is at work in medical school admissions, with similar results that lead to the sort of appallingly callous group-preservation outcomes described in the original article and some of the comments here.

The entire system is irreversibly broken at the most fundamental levels, as this same class of decision makers are the ones who are consulted when developing the next round of gatekeeping tests and curricula.

Look, if you can't quit poppy seeds for a single pee test, you're probably an addict. (parody)

The article seems to focus on the unreliability of drug testing, which is a great topic, but IMHO, the real issue here is mothers being drug-tested, seemingly without their consent or knowledge. Furthermore, I feel like focusing on the reliability of drug testing (again, a great topic) implies the practice of drug testing mothers is acceptable. It's not. We all wanna protect babies, and punish bad parents, but why does this seem to always fall on mothers/women? Yes, I know there's plenty of laws that could apply to fathers, but I've never heard of a dude getting drug-tested without his consent as a condition of fatherhood.

Because many people really really want to criminalize using drugs while pregnant. Some states already have.

Edit: Washington state updated their state guidelines so that if a baby tests positive for opiates and they match a prescribed medication the mother is taking then they don’t need to make a report to CPS. You literally had news articles screaming that babies would die because of this change.

e.g this article is a good example of the coverage: mostly they never even explained that it had to be a prescribed drug to get out of reporting https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/wa-hospital...

Being fair, I've seen the effect mere alcohol has on a child first hand. It's not subtle, and it is debilitating for the child in the long run. Can you imagine your child being addicted to meth coming out of the womb, and how it affected their development?

There's a lot of prescription drugs that doctors will take pregnant women off due to the impact it can have on the fetus. To the point where it could kill the mother (thinking mostly of long-term cancer treatments for this use-case).

I get that, but why doesn't any of this fall on dudes? Yes, mothers actually "give birth", but focusing punishment only on mothers implies that dudes lack accountability in the birthing process, like, "Here ya go. Here's some sperm. It's all on you now."

Sorry, not trying to be argumentative. But I'm just kinda passionate about this stuff. And I don't even have any kids! LOL

dudes dont have babies, man

No, they certainly do not. But they are directly involved in causing pregnancies. They are directly involved in the cause of everything a woman goes through prior to giving birth.

I can be fall down drunk 24x7 the whole 10 months my wife is pregnant. Not going to affect the baby.

Also, can I decide what my wife puts in her body?

> I can be fall down drunk 24x7 the whole 10 months my wife is pregnant. Not going to affect the baby.

Ironically, it probably will. Having a husband be that drunk would likely stress the mother, which does indeed affect the baby.

> Also, can I decide what my wife puts in her body?

If you're a husband whose judgement and word she can trust, I'd assume that she would take your opinions quite seriously.

> "Here ya go. Here's some sperm. It's all on you now."

This is definitely a problem. There's remarkably little accountability for a man's role in the shit a woman has to go through while pregnant and giving birth.

I don't know what to do about that though. Start child care payments backdated to conception if they leave? Base their child care costs on their earnings when they decided to have sex?

   remarkably little accountability for a man's role in the shit a woman has to go through while pregnant and giving birth.

Weird how "My body, my choice" turns into "my body, your problem" the picosecond it is convenient.

Woman have not been held accountable for promiscuity for the last 50 years and the results are just in: it has destroyed society.

> Woman have not been held accountable for promiscuity for the last 50 years and the results are just in: it has destroyed society.

Sex is a two-person activity. If you really believe it's destroyed society, you have to put equal blame on the men who rewarded and indulged in such "promiscuity." Blaming it solely on women is silly (and yes, also misogynistic). This stance also removes the agency of men, reducing them to nothing more than an animal who acts solely on their base instincts.

For the record, I disagree 100% that abortion rights have destroyed society. Heck, I don't even think that society is in terrible shape. With that said, if I were to be a reductionist and try to put a finger on issues we are facing, they would boil down to hate and greed (less selfish greed and more "I want to have more money than God" greed).

I’m a foster parent so yes, I can imagine it. But more relevantly - we are talking about prescription drugs that a doctor did not take the mother off. If there are risks, the prescribing medical professional is perfectly well set up to know about them. CPS doesn’t need to be involved.

If people thought this desperately needed to be reported somehow, it should be a report to the medical licensing board - the prescriber is the one who made the decision that she should take it, and it’s their medical decision making being questioned. Of course that would probably lead to doctors refusing to prescribe anything to pregnant women.

I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying here, but "many people really really want to criminalize using drugs while pregnant" is a much broader statement than a pregnant woman taking prescribed medications. That is what I was referring to.

Also, CPS is a joke: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40379325#40381801

It's a touch off topic, but you should ask a woman how often they are given a pregnancy test. With or without their consent, and even if they're physically incapable of having children as documented in their chart.

> She wondered aloud what neighbors would say if they saw her daughter playing in the mud, if someone might accuse her of being a bad parent.

I can't really get inside the head of the assholes who judge kids playing in the mud. It's real.

> The day after Smith delivered her son, a doctor told her that she and her baby had tested positive for meth and that the hospital had notified child protective services... Smith’s husband, Michael, asked the doctor to review his wife’s medical records to confirm her prescription, according to the doctor’s notes.

Is there a reckoning coming for OB/GYN training in America?

Yes, but (unfortunately) not from this. From fewer and fewer states having candidates come to train in those states to become an OB/GYN due to the restrictive abortion laws. Not to mention the experienced OB/GYN are leaving for the same reason.

There was a talk show host that use to talk about this about 15 years ago. I tried but I cannot seem to find any clips of him on youtube.

Not a talk show, but the pilot season of Mythbusters tackled this. They registered some false positives and the test manufacturer refused to admit it was possible.

Yeah. That was really eye opening. They had to go to a proper lab to have the false positive properly assessed. And they had that false positive for close to 24 hours, as I recall.

The drug testing nonsense in the US is the weirdest thing. Here it seems that it even supplant the actual thing you want to achieve - identifying children with development damage from the mothers drug abuse. If the child is perfectly healthy it shouldn't matter what any drug test states. It's like the testing is more important than the outcome.

My son was embarrassed that he wet himself during class one day (he's way too old for this, we've had him medically evaluated and come out with no medical issues, etc... he just will get engrossed in screens and relieve himself because he doesn't want to leave to the bathroom).

Anyway the substitute teacher that day believed his sob story about how angry his mother would get when she finds out he's soiled himself, and this ends up in a referral to child protective services. A case agent is assigned, comes to visit the house while I'm out of town (we had no idea until she showed up at the door). Thankfully, no action was taken. But now we have this "black mark" on our record as parents for five years.

I get why these agencies exist, and there are real problems out there. But to be caught up in these bureaucratic regimes is a total nightmare, as you're presumed to be a total douchebag until proven otherwise. It's terrifying.

It's the classical problem of how do you provide protection for someone with no power in a relationship against the person with all the power in a relationship.

Do you believe the rape victim, or the rapist? The child or the parent? The physically/mentally disabled or their care givers?

Sadly, there's been too many people in power who have proven themselves to be assholes to just trust the people with the power when they say they're not assholes.

Them coming unannounced is exactly how it should work. You’re not a customer in that situation - you are the suspect. There are real problems out there. In this case it was suspicious that you might be one of them.

Your own child has a problem and you’re saying “we’ve had him evaluated” like they’re some malfunctioning animal. And then you’re calling his distress a “sob story”. Yikes! Obviously, I don’t know your real situation, but the way I understand it, presuming people are douchebags works when it comes to this social work stuff. Something strange happened and it would make sense that it would be recorded if other pathologies/patterns are detected later.

> And then you’re calling his distress a “sob story”. Yikes!

Make no mistake: kids, and people in general, are manipulative creatures.

True, hence my comment pertains more to perceptions and judgements than actual facts - I don’t know this person or their family. Just that the system is working as it should by treating every situation with a healthy degree of suspicion.

After all - adults can be manipulative creatures too.

They're calling his sob story (about how angry his mother gets) a sob story, not calling his distress a sob story.

The teacher is a 'mandatory reporter'. The teacher effectively lacks agency in deciding to report or not an issue that may be interpreted (by others evaluating the teacher's decision) as a potential sign of abuse. The teacher faces potentially severe consequences for not reporting if judged that they should have. And, faces zero consequences for over-zealous reporting.

Medical staff are also mandatory reporters.

Sue the hospital is all I can say. Also sue the social worker personally, and their employer too. Document and record everything.

Be careful about making any statements that could be misconstrued as evidence against you, but feel free to yell at the staff (never at the police) to show your immediate disgust.

Sue the social worker personally, this represents exceptionally poor judgment and critical thinking skills. Truly bottom of their class, local governments hiring the bottom of the barrel. Costco would even have a digital receipt for any member purchase if they discarded the paper one. Wouldn't police at least have to have probable cause before even running a test like this?

1 visit to this families home the day after should have been sufficient to clear this up.

Why is the US government like this?

In democracies, governments reflect their citizens.

Great thing we’re not a democracy then.

Our next president is likely going to be someone who none of us actually voted for in a primary.

Popular vote is not decisive for that vote anyway.

A system where the whole populace votes on everything isn't the only kind of democracy. The US is a representative democracy.

Did I say they have to vote on everything?

Why the fuck are they drug testing?

Fuck this shit. Hospitals aren’t police.

Do you understand the effect they have on unborn children?

I understand separating a mother from a baby that was just born will have life long impacts on that baby yes.

Technically, heroin should be legal just like marijuana is legal. It was used for thousands of years as a minor addiction and without harm, providing much needed relief to people. (I'm not saying it's suitable for prenatal use.) The pharma industry will never allow it to happen, preferring to sell their narcotics instead.

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