COMING CLEAN—NOT GETTING CLEAN –
Aug. 14, 2023 – This is common for the thousands of babies born in Australia to mothers who used ice late in their pregnancies, with agonising withdrawal symptoms leading to feeding difficulties.
‘They can have real issues with the coordination of their jaw which means that they can’t suck at the bottle or the breast,’ midwife Elvira Earthstar, of the Women’s Alcohol and Drug Service at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne said.
‘These babies can also present with tremors or jitters. So just a real pronounced shake in their hands.’
The difficulty with feeding can then lead to further developmental problems. If we don’t take action to really get the right amount of milk into them, they can then start to miss some … milestones,’ Ms Earthstar said.
Terrianne said while she previously blamed herself for using drugs while she was pregnant, now she understands she is also a victim.
‘It’s not really my fault. Something happened to me when I was a 13-year-old child which started my addiction from 13. That’s all I really knew. It was just a repetitive cycle.’
She spoke about why using drugs often won over the safety of the baby growing inside her.
‘It was hard. I tried a lot of times to stop, but I guess the more you take, the longer you take it, the addiction just stays there. Addiction is a very vicious cycle,’ she said.
Alysha, 24, is another woman who finds it hard to reconcile why she used drugs while pregnant.
‘I never wanted to be a pregnant drug user,’ she said. ‘I didn’t plan to get pregnant, so, I was already using when I fell pregnant.’
Like Terrianne, there are deep rooted reasons behind why Alysha started to use drugs in the first place.
‘There’s a lot of stuff that’s happened in the last three years that I’ve tried to forget about, so I was just using (drugs). I was just surviving,’ she said.
‘But I thought, how am I gonna live with myself when I have this baby and know that I used when I’m pregnant …
‘I feel like me using drugs when I’m pregnant, that’s the lowest I could have possibly gone. It’s the one thing I said I would never, ever, ever, ever do and I did it.’
For years, Alysha found it very hard to get the help she needed.
‘There’s been points in my life where I’ve been in hospitals and I’ve been, like, begging, crying for help and they’ve just looked at me like, you’re a worthless junkie,’ she said.
