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by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

The Marshall Project, a “nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system,” just published an investigative report about a topic I have written about for the past decade, which is that States can take your baby away from you anytime they want based simply on a drug test, even if that drug test is false.

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

Hospitals use drug tests that return false positives from poppy seed bagels, decongestants and Zantac. Yet newborns are being taken from parents based on the results.

Susan Horton had been a stay-at-home mom for almost 20 years, and now — pregnant with her fifth child — she felt a hard-won confidence in herself as a mother.

Then she ate a salad from Costco.

It was her final meal before going to Kaiser Permanente hospital in Santa Rosa, in northern California, to give birth in August 2022. It had been an exhausting pregnancy.

Her family had just moved houses, and Horton was still breastfeeding her toddler. Because of her teenage son’s heart condition, she remained wary of COVID-19 and avoided crowded places, even doctor’s offices.

Now, already experiencing the clawing pangs of contractions, she pulled out a frozen pizza and a salad with creamy everything dressing, savoring the hush that fell over the house, the satisfying crunch of the poppy seeds as she ate.

Horton didn’t realize that she would be drug tested before her child’s birth. Or that the poppy seeds in her salad could trigger a positive result on a urine drug screen, the quick test that hospitals often use to check pregnant patients for illicit drugs. Many common foods and medications — from antacids to blood pressure and cold medicines — can prompt erroneous results.

The morning after Horton delivered her daughter, a nurse told her she had tested positive for opiates. Horton was shocked. She hadn’t requested an epidural or any narcotic pain medication during labor — she didn’t even like taking Advil.

“You’re sure it was mine?” she asked the nurse.

If Horton had been tested under different circumstances — for example, if she was a government employee and required to be tested as part of her job — she would have been entitled to a more advanced test and to a review from a specially trained doctor to confirm the initial result.

But as a mother giving birth, Horton had no such protections. The hospital quickly reported her to child welfare, and the next day, a social worker arrived to take baby Halle into protective custody. (Source.)

And if you are tempted to think that this was all just an honest mistake made possible by too much bureaucracy, and that this could never happen intentionally, I will remind you that this is the same county in California, Sonoma County, where a foster and adoptive parent was just sentenced to six consecutive life sentences in prison last week for torturing, starving, raping and sodomizing his three foster children, whom he kept hidden from the public for 10 years, with the help of the Sonoma County Family, Youth and Children’s Services (FYCS). See:

California Foster Father Sentenced to 6 Life Terms in Child Sex Trafficking Case: Hid Children for 10 Years Where They Were Chained, Raped, Tortured, and Starved

The Marshall Project investigation does a good job showing how widespread and common this problem is of taking babies away from parents on false drug tests.

For decades, state and federal laws have required hospitals across the country to identify newborns affected by drugs in the womb and to refer such cases to child protective services for possible investigation. To comply, hospitals often use urine drug screens that are inexpensive (as little as $10 per test), simple to administer (the patient pees in a cup), and provide results within minutes.

But urine drug screens are easily misinterpreted and often wrong, with false positive rates as high as 50%, according to some studies. Without confirmation testing and additional review, false positive results can lead hospitals to wrongly accuse parents of illicit drug use and report babies to child welfare agencies — which may separate newborns from their families, an investigation by The Marshall Project and Reveal has found.

It’s unclear how many of the nation’s 3.6 million births every year involve drug testing, but health care experts said urine screening is ubiquitous. Tens of thousands of infants are reported annually to authorities for in utero drug exposure, with no guarantee that the underlying tests are accurate, our analysis of federal data shows.

To report this story, The Marshall Project interviewed dozens of patients, medical providers, toxicologists and other experts, and collected information on more than 50 mothers in 22 states who faced reports and investigations over positive drug tests that were likely wrong. We also pored over thousands of pages of policy documents from every state child welfare agency in the country.

Problems with drug screens are well known, especially in workplace testing. But there’s been little investigation of how easily false positives can occur inside labor and delivery units, and how quickly families can get trapped inside a system of surveillance and punishment.

Hospitals reported women for positive drug tests after they ate everything bagels and lemon poppy seed muffins, or used medications including the acid reducer Zantac, the antidepressant Zoloft and labetalol, one of the most commonly prescribed blood pressure treatments for pregnant women.

After a California mother had a false positive for meth and PCP, authorities took her newborn, then dispatched two sheriff’s deputies to also remove her toddler from her custody, court records show.

In New York, hospital administrators refused to retract a child welfare report based on a false positive result, and instead offered the mother counseling for her trauma, according to a recording of the conversation.

And when a Pennsylvania woman tested positive for opioids after eating pasta salad, the hearing officer in her case yelled at her to “buck up, get a backbone, and stop crying,” court records show.

It took three months to get her newborn back from foster care.

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. At hospitals, test results often come with warnings about false positives and direct clinicians to confirm the findings with more definitive tests.

Yet state policies and many hospitals tend to treat drug screens as unassailable evidence of illicit use, The Marshall Project found. Hospitals across the country routinely report cases to authorities without ordering confirmation tests or waiting to receive the results.

At least 27 states explicitly require hospitals to alert child welfare agencies after a positive screen or potential exposure, according to a review of state laws and policies by The Marshall Project.

But not a single state requires hospitals to confirm test results before reporting them. At least 25 states do not require child welfare workers to confirm positive test results, either.

While parents often lack protections, most of the caseworkers who investigate them are entitled to confirmation testing and a review if they test positive for drugs on the job, our analysis found.

Even when a doctor refutes a positive result and vouches for their patient, hospitals may report the incorrect data anyway to child welfare agencies.

“It’s almost like a gut punch. You come to the hospital and you see a social work note on your patient’s chart,”

said Dr. Yashica Robinson, an OB/GYN in Huntsville, Alabama, who has tried and failed several times to halt child welfare reports and investigations of patients with false positive results.

“Once that ball is rolling, it’s hard to stop it,” Robinson said.

No government agency collects comprehensive data on false positive results or how many pregnant patients are tested. And confidentiality laws that shield medical and child welfare records make it difficult for the public to understand how many families are affected.

In 2016, Congress mandated states to submit the number of “substance-affected” infants to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Not all states track every case, but from fiscal years 2018 through 2022, medical professionals reported at least 170,000 infants to child welfare agencies for exposure to substances, according to an analysis by The Marshall Project.

In 2022 alone, more than 35,000 such cases were reported, and authorities removed more than 6,000 infants from their families, our analysis found.

The harms of drug testing fall disproportionately on low-income, Black, Hispanic and Native American women, who studies have found are more likely to be tested when they give birth, more likely to be investigated, and less likely to reunite with their children after they’ve been removed.

But the false-positive cases The Marshall Project identified include parents of all socioeconomic classes and occupations — from a lawyer to a school librarian to a nurse who drug tests other people for a living.

“People should be concerned,” said Dr. Stephen Patrick, a leading neonatal researcher who chairs the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta.

“This could happen to any one of us.”

Source.

Indeed, not only “could” this happen to any one of us, it DOES happen, all the time, and we have documented numerous cases where this has happened over the past decade.

Medical Kidnapping in Los Angeles: 2 Day Old Infant Seized at Hospital From Mother

A California mother had her newborn child kidnapped in Los Angeles earlier this month (July 2016). Lori Ibrahim had her 2-day old infant seized from her right after giving birth at Kaiser Permanente South Bay Medical Center.

Apparently, Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) and doctors at Kaiser determined that this mother, who already was parenting a five year old son that she was awarded sole custody in a divorce case, was a danger to her newborn son, and removed him from her care while she was trying to breast-feed him.

Why?

That’s the question that Lori and her husband have been asking the past couple of weeks, as not only has DCFS taken away their newborn baby, but also her 5 year old son in what appears to be another tragic case of State-sponsored medical kidnapping, where the State steps in and takes children away from good parents for reasons other than abuse.

Unbeknownst to her, Lori was given a urine drug test at the hospital that she was never informed about, nor had given consent. Since she had been prescribed medications by her OB Gyn during pregnancy, and because she had received drugs from the hospital during the birth of her baby who was delivered by a surgical cesarean procedure, it is not surprising that the drug test was positive.

A drug test was then taken for the baby, and the baby tested clean for the presence of any drugs.

Nevertheless, doctors ordered DCFS to take custody of the baby away from his mother, and treat the baby with methadone, a powerful drug used to wean people off of drugs like heroin.

Lori was not only robbed of her children, but declared to be a child abuser with no formal charges, no proper investigation, and no trial or chance to defend herself, effectively ending her 15 year career as a child educator. (Full Story.)

4-Month-Old Arizona Baby Dies After Being Taken from Mother and Put into Home with Two Foster Dads Who Adopted 18 Kids

Reporter Dianna M. Náñez brings us the tragic story of a 4-month-old baby girl who was loved by her parents, but taken away by Arizona CPS and given to a foster home where two gay men lived, and who have adopted 15 kids.

The little baby girl died last week when one of the foster dads left baby Samora in a hot car for hours, allegedly forgetting that she was still in the car.

According to the report in the Arizona Republic, the foster dad has not been arrested. In fact, the Arizona Republic has written very positive articles about the gay couple describing how they are wonderful parents.

In all the years I have been covering medical kidnapping stories out of Arizona, I don’t recall another case where a child died in foster care and the local media decided to write positive articles about the foster parents who had custody of the child and neglected to keep the child safe.

The mother claims the baby was taken away because the baby allegedly tested positive for drugs, even though she herself tested negative for any drugs. (Full Story.)

Alabama Mother Separated from Newborn Baby for Days Because of False Drug Test After Eating Poppy Seeds

Another case where a false drug test was used as justification to medically kidnap a newborn baby and separate the infant from the mother, during one of the most crucial times when a baby needs to bond with their mother just after birth.

WAFF 48 News in Huntsville, Alabama, picked up the story.

When WAFF posted the story on social media, they say the story was exposed to tens of thousands of people who read it, and they received hundreds of comments from people saying they had experienced similar experiences with Child Protective Services.

Why the hospital tested Ms. Hernandez for drugs, and whether or not Ms. Hernandez agreed to the drug testing, is not known. She spoke to reporters via a Spanish interpreter. (Full Story.)

Indeed, this must be widespread in Alabama (and probably in most other states), because we published a report in 2019 about an Alabama laboratory owner who was falsifying drug tests in child custody cases, and that article received over 100,000 views.

Alabama Lab Owner Arrested for Falsifying Results of Drug Tests Used to Medically Kidnap Children

Local media in Alabama are reporting that Brandy Murrah, owner of A&J Lab Collections in Ozark, Alabama, has turned herself in to local police over charges that she falsified paternity tests and drug test screenings in child custody cases.

Dale County District Attorney Kirke Adams has stated that Murrah’s actions may have resulted in a potential “tidal wave” of DHR cases where children were removed from their parents based on false evidence from her lab. (Full article.)

In 2022, a drug testing company used by courts around the country to decide whether people go to jail or parents retain custody of their children, was under investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for fraud.

Averhealth runs millions of drug tests a year, working with courts and government agencies in 34 states. (Reported by Vice News, our report here.)

Recovered News Report from Kentucky Shows How Corrupt CPS is, Where Rich People Can Put in “Orders” for Children in the Community

In 2006 and 2007, Kentucky investigative reporter John Boel exposed much of the corruption taking place in the “child protection” system in Kentucky.

His reports were broadcast in the local media at that time, and included some amazing interviews with former CPS whistleblowers, documenting the depth of the alleged corruption within Kentucky CPS.

In a report aired originally on WLKY Target 32 News, news anchors begin the story by explaining that the station had to go to court just to get permission to air their investigative report, because the State of Kentucky attempted to censor their report from the public.

Reporter John Boel stated that they were “being swamped with complaints” against CPS in Kentucky. He explained that his report gave an “in-depth look” into Kentucky CPS which exemplifies what they were hearing from so many other families who were coming to them.

Boel reported that children are often removed quickly with no evidence of parental wrongdoing, and that the State retaliates against those who try to fight back.

In one of his most amazing videos, some of the Kentucky CPS whistleblowers, who chose to keep their identity hidden, revealed how some people would actually put in orders for children from poorer families in the community and pay CPS to go kidnap them.

It was one of the most amazing reports on child kidnapping through CPS I had ever seen!

Back when we reported this in 2015, YouTube was not yet censoring and removing videos they did not like, and I never saved the video.

Well yesterday a friend of mine told me about a way to retrieve lost YouTube videos, and I found some of John Boel’s old videos!

The one with the CPS whistleblowers is now on our Bitchute and Odysee channels.

Don’t Give Birth to a Child in a Hospital!

If you want to reduce the chances that the State will steal your baby at birth, just don’t have your baby in the evil, Satanic medical system!

That’s the growing trend these days for doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals who work in the system delivering babies, but have chosen NOT to have their own children in that very same system that they work in delivering other women’s babies.

Why are Medical Professionals who Deliver Babies in Hospitals Choosing to have their Own Babies at Home?

Trending Among American Doctors: Obstetricians, Labor Nurses, and Other Medical Professionals Choosing to Have Their Babies at Home

by Jennifer Margulis, Special to Health Impact News

It used to be one of the best-kept secrets in the medical profession.

Doctors, when they talked openly about it, were met with raised eyebrows and worried looks.

They were ridiculed by their colleagues, lost professional standing, and were sometimes even browbeaten into leaving their jobs.

But now an increasing number of doctors, labor and delivery nurses, certified nurse midwives, physician assistants, and other medical professionals are choosing to birth their babies at home.

And these doctors and other medical professionals are talking more openly about having home births than they ever have before.

“We’ve had countless midwives who work in hospitals deliver with us, a number of labor and delivery nurses, a neuroscientist, a pediatric oncologist, two pediatricians, medical residents planning to specialize in obstetrics, and at least one family practice doc,”

says Mairi Breen Rothman, a certified nurse midwife based in suburban Maryland who sits on the board of the American College of Nurse-Midwives. Rothman birthed two of her four children at home.

“They are definitely being more open about it … Home birth has become a more acceptable form of care.”

Read the full article here.

Comment on this article at HealthImpactNews.com.

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