A recent study from the Children’s Hospital Of Philadelphia has recently revealed that babies born to parents who used cocaine while pregnant, had no significant long-term growth effects different than those who’s parents didn’t use. Twenty-Five years ago, the government Ok’d a $7.9 million study on the growth of “crack babies.’ The researcher was supposed to document the long-term health effects that crack/cocaine use while pregnant was severely detrimental to children. While reviewing the study, researchers, instead, found out that it wasn’t as simple as it seemed.
Hallam Hurt, then chair of neonatology at Albert Einstein Medical Center on North Broad Street in Philly, decided in 1989 –during the height of the crack epidemic– to find if the myths surrounding crack babies were true.
Originally, 224 children were included in the research however, they were able to keep tabs on 110. As per PhillyDotCom, “Of the 110, two are dead – one shot in a bar and another in a drive-by shooting – three are in prison, six graduated from college, and six more are on track to graduate. There have been 60 children born to the 110 participants.”
That led researchers to check if they had missed a crucial factor in the study, but their groundbreaking answers are what caused a stir. Hurt stated at a lecture [that] “Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine.”
Claire Coles, a psychiatry professor at Emory University, has been tracking a group of low-income Atlanta children. She went on to say, “As a society we say, ‘Cocaine is bad and therefore it must cause damage to babies. … When you have a myth, it tends to linger for a long time.”
So, it seems that violence has more of an effect on children than drug abuse during pregancy.
