Indianapolis Recorder, Indianapolis, Marion County, 10 November 1990 — Page 2

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THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER

SATURDAY. NOVEMBER 10.1990

SPECIAL REPORT

Healthcare

Pregnant and addicted Few people face a greater stigma than a pregnant woman burdened by drug addiction, but few drug addicts get less help in battling their habits.

By SHARON COHEN Associated Press DETROIT (AP) — Wanda Kaiglcr is having her seventh baby and this time, she has a new goal in life — to become a mother again, and a drug addict no more. She wants to start over, to break free of the crack, heroin, pills and weed that consumed her for 21 years and robbed her of everything precious: her health, her pride, even her six children. “All I ever wanted was to get married and have kids and take care of them," she says quietly. “I got married, I got kids. He died. The kids got taken. And I’m a drug addict." She’s working to change that at the Elconore Hutzel Recovery Center, one of a few comprehensive programs in the nation providing medical care, counseling and housing for pregnant and other addicted women. “I know that if I can keep drugs out of my system, I can keep the baby,” she says. “There’s still a chance I can get my kids back — maybe.” “I want to give up on myself but I know I can’t,” she adds tearfully. “I want to be drug free and I know I can do it... Sometimes, I don’t know how to go about it.” For most pregnant addicts in America, the problem isn’t how, but where. Public drug treatment programs, in short supply nationwide, are rarer still for these women, experts say. Traditionally, most are designed for men. All of this is especially frustrating, experts say, because pregnancy often motivates women to seek help. “If they don’t find a program out there, chances are we’ve lost them,” Mrs. Hudicck said. “Some die. Some 'end up in hospital emergency rooms giving birth to crack-addicted babies.” Pregnant addicts often ignore their health. One woman said it was easier to walk four houses to buy crack than take a bus four miles for prenatal care. Others sell furniture, food stamps, even themselves for drugs. About 180 addicts arc in Hutzcl's 21-year-old program; about half are pregnant and 50 percent of those women take methadone to prevent miscarriages. Hutzel provides counseling, child care, lunch, transportation and prenatal care. The residential recovery program houses women and their young children in a former convent. Many have long histories of addiction. Wanda Kaiglcr, now 37, says her drug use began at age 16. She nearly died six years ago from bad heroin, and though she survived, her habit has stripped her bare. “It makes you lose your friends, your family, your furniture, your home, your respect for yourself,” she

said. “You feel terrible afterwards. As long as you do it, you feel good.” A widow for three years, Miss Kaigler also lost her six children, ages 2 to 17, when they were removed by authorities. She wants them back, proudly noting two arc honors students. “I love my kids,” she said. “They don’t think so. Sometimes, I don’t think so.” Kelly Barrington’s concern for her baby, coupled with the threat of losing her 9-year-old daughter, led her to Hutzel. “God knew the only way I was going to stop is if I got pregnant,” said Miss Barrington, a drug abuser for 15 of her 31 years who switched to crack from heroin after her veins collapsed. “I couldn’t live with the fact that I hurt an innocent baby.” She, too, had hit bottom. She was jailed briefly, lost everything and was so desperate she’d drag her daughter to dope houses, explaining she was sick and “that was the medicine I needed.” Her daughter responded by repeatedly breaking her crack pipes. “I U7 to forgive myself and say I was a sick person,”

said Miss Barrington, her purse adorned with badges for every month she has been drug-free. “I feel great that God gave me another chance to turn things around.” Eighty percent to 85 percent of the women complete Hutzel's pregnancy program, which serves about 250 females a year. About a quarter continue in recovery, but more than half of those who inquire never show up. Some fear prosecutions will deter even more. A Massachusetts judge last month threw out an indictment charging a 24-year-old mother with drug distribution for cocaine found in her infant son. At Hutzel, Wanda Kaigler knows all about consequences. But she plans to stay clean and dreams of living with her kids “a^ay from drugs.” “Anything you have faith in and believe in,” she said, “you can have.”

Wanda Kaigler, right, Is having contractions while taHdng with Kelly Barrington at the Eleonore Hutzel Recovery Center In Detroit. Kaigler Is having her seventh baby and this time, she has a new goal In life, to become a mother again, and a drug addict no more. Hutzel is one of a few comprehensive programs In the nation providing medical care, counseling and housing for pregnant and other addicted women.

One woman’s success story

By MITCHELL LANDSBERG Associated Press WASHINGTON — When Kortenae Porter hit bottom, she was sleeping outside the Lincoln Memorial, doing drugs and pregnant with twins. Her boyfriend was in jail and she was lonely, scared and tired. “I don’t know if you know the term ‘sick and tiredof being sick and tired,’ but that’s what I was. I was tired of being out there. I was tired of not having anything." As she relates this now. Miss Porter is sitting in a playroom at the Hospital for Sick Children. She is a big, neatly dressed woman with large brown eyes and a radiant smile that is directed often at the squirming 15pound bundle in her arms — her surviving son, Kywan. They are both survivors, Kortenae and Kywan. She is off drugs now, working for a job-placement company and sharing an apartment with two senior citizens. He is robustly healthy, hospitalized only for observation to ensure that he doesn’t succumb to the fate of his brother, who died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. “I feel I’m blessed,” Miss Porter says.

Hers is a success story with scars. When she realized she was pregnant, she tried to quit drugs, knowing they could damage her babies. "It was a struggle," she says, “because I was trying to stop all by myself.” In the second month of herpregnancy, she sought prenatal care, and that made all the difference. “I went to prenatal care and the doctors told me, definitely, to quit. And I told them I was trying but it wasn’t thateasy. They advised me to get some help, and that’s what I did — I got some help." Miss Porter enrolled in a 21-day drug treatment program, after which she was placed in transitional housing for pregnant women. She kept up with her prenatal care and at 3 a.m. last May 11, Kywan and Tywan Porter were bom — full term and seemingly healthy. Studies suggest that Sudden Infant Death Syndrome—“crib death"— strikes the babies of drug abusers at a greater rate than the population at large. Kortenae Porter doesn’t spend her days wondering whether it was drugs that killed little Tywan; she grieves over his passing and prays for his brother. “I’m just really thankful that I’m here, and I have my little boy,” she says. “He’s my heart, you know, he really is. He keeps me going on.”

■ Some 280,000 pregnant women nationwide needed drug treatment, yet less than 30,000 received care, accordlno to a 1990 survey. ■ Two-thirds of 18 big-city hospitals surveyed last year by a U.S. House committee had no place to send pregnant women for drug treatment. ■ A New York study found 54 percent of treatment programs excluded expectant women; 87 percent rejected pregnant Medicaid recipients addicted to crack.

Is a pregnant addict guilty of a crime?

Clinics, MOM Project part of answer for at-risk babies Continued from Page A1

By SHARON COHEN Associated Press When Traci Jackson gave birth toa stillborn child, Texas authorities say, she had with her a deadly weapon. It wasn’t a gun or a knife, but cocaine — in her body. That’s what Houston prosecutors will argue when the 20-year-old woman faces trial Nov. 12 on a cocaine possession charge that could send her to prison for up to 20 years. The trial is among more than 50 cases in 20 stales and the District of Columbia in which pregnant drug abusers have been charged with crimes ranging from child abuse or neglect to drug delivery, homicide and assault with a deadly weapon. These actions "are all illegal extensions of the state statutes by prosecutors who want to get their names in the paper ” argues Lynn Paltrow, an ACLU attorney in New York. Some courts, too, have been troubled by this approach. A Boston judge last month dismissed a drug charge against a woman whose baby was born with cocaine in its system. “There is no familiar bond more intimate and more fundamental than that between the mother and the fetus she carries in her woman,” Judge

Suzanne DelVccchio wrote. “This court will not permit the desu-uction of this relationship by the prosecution.” “It’s about lime we notified those who would use cocaine while pregnant that they’d better stop it,” said Casey O’Brien, a Houston prosecutor in the Jackson case. “It’s just not fair to others. It’s not fair to their children. It’s not fair to society that... (takes on the responsibility) for their children who survive or arc damaged irreparably by cocaine." In the Houston case, the state claims Miss Jackson — her attorney says her real name is Beverly Amos—entered a bathroom in an apartment and shortly thereafter gave birth to a stillborn baby, later found inside a bag in a closet The government says Miss Jackson used crack that day; an autopsy found the baby had large quantities of cocaine in its liver. Prosecutors say DNA testing provides circumstantial evidence she was the infant's mother. Defense attorney Alex Bunin doesn’t acknowledge the woman had a child and says the charge violates equal protection. “A man cannot be prosecuted for that crime,” he said. "The baby never had a chance,” O’Brien said. "The cocaine killed it in the womb. Whether it killed it legally or practically, the remit is the same.”

frontal assault on the forces that feed infant mortality statistics. The savings in lives and money recently persuaded the General Accounting Office to recommend that Congress fund home-visiting through Medicaid. “Myself, I didn’t have the best life coming up,” Sanders said, hugging heryoungestdaughteragainst a swollen belly just before Tyrone’s birth. “But I’m going to give them the best that I can.” Not all women who need help having healthy babies are as ready to cooperate as Sanders; a hand offered is not always accepted, the outreach workers have been dismayed to leam. Carol Sanders’ sister was five months pregnant with her second child and already in pre-term labor when Harrison began visiting. Unhappy about her pregnancy, the 18-year-old ignored most of the health worker’s advice about rest and diet The result was 2-pound, 5-ounce Antonette, bom at 28 weeks and lingering in the hospital intensive care nursery weeks after her full-term cousin had gone home with his mother. “There’s one group that all we need to do is get them hooked up with prenatal care, improve their nutrition, teach them basic parenting,” MOM Projset Director Joanne Martin said. “But there’s another reservoir of people for whom that’s notenough. They havea lotof problems in their lives, and being pregnant is only one of them. For that group, we need to be more creative and not throw up our hands in despair.” Despair runs deep in Indianapolis’ inner-city neighborhoods, where toddlers play in dirt shiny with broken glass and houses rot behind boarded windows. In the worst of these areas, where the Sanden sisters live, 37 of every 1,000 babies die before age 1. But city officials were unaware of the deaths in the shadows of their new downtown skyscrapers and sports facilities until the fact was splashed across the front pages of local papers. The news was bleak. In 1986 and 1987, more black infants died in Indianapolis than any other major city in America, at a rate of more than 23 per thousand Stunned city leaden hastily did their own calculations. There was no mistake. “It’s a shock when you see these headlines and wonder who’s not doing their job,” said Dave Arland, spokesman for Mayor William HudnuL "But it’s been a situation of not addressing it, not addressing it, not addressing it over the years, and then we wind up at the lop of the heap.”

A city-county commission that studied the problem discovered an overburdened health care system. Clinics didn’t exist in the neighborhoods with the highest infant death rates, and a woman could wait weeks for an appointment at existing facilities. And the seemingly simple task of riding a bus to the hospital orclinic was arduous and time-consuming. Improvement in the U.S. infant mortality rate stalled in 1985 for the first time in 20 years. That same year, there were increases in the number of babies born with a low birth weight and bom prematurely, under 5 1/2 pounds and before 37 weeks. ' Low birthweight babies are 40 times more likely to die during the first month of life. A very low birthweight baby like Antonette, who weighs less than 3 1/4 pounds, is 200 times more likely to die in her first month of life than her normal weight cousin, Tyrone.

they move from one clinic to another. A motor coach equipped with a state-of-the-art ultrasound machine, part of the March of Dimes-funded MOM Project, travels to different county clinic sites to serve those patients. This fall, four care-coordination teams are fanning out across the city. The black infant mortality rate is falling; the rate for 1988 was 20.3 per 1,000, down from 23.7 in 1987. So far, the MOM Project team has taken 270 referrals and opened 183 cases. Sixty-eight babies have been born, only five of them under 5 1/2 pounds, a low birthweight rate half that of the area they serve. The infant mortality commission estimates that every low-birthweight birth the workers avert represents an instant savings of$14,000to $30,000. At most, the team has only to prevent 14 such births to

“Making sure their babies have health care... isn’t glamorous stuff... It saves money. And it saves lives.” National Commission to Prsvsnt Infant Mortality Executive Director Rae Grad About40,000babies younger than 12 months die equal its own annual operating costs, annually in the United States, two-thirds of those in The four MOM Project workers try to spend at the first 28 days of life. Two black infants die for least eight hours a week doing outreach, haunting every white one, the worst disparity in 50 years. Medicaid lines and welfare offices, jumping out of Health officials say infant death hits the black cars to talk to women on city streets. “Are you pregcommunity disproportionalely because black women nant?” they ask. “Do you know anyone who is?^ and their babies suffer more from the ravages of That’s how Harrison found Tracy Kersey, 17 and poverty: lack of education, inadequate prenatal care, the mother of one, who settled her bulk uncomfortalower maternal age, a high number of previous and bly ina chair and proudly announced she no longer unwanted births, poor nutrition, smoking raid sub- smokes. Harrison’s support made it possible, stance abuse. “You fed like it’s somebody there for you when Alter those factors and save lives, said the Na- you don’t have nobody there,” Kersey said. “She’s bona! Commission to Prevent Infant Mortality, someone you talk to when you’re have troubles.” which called in 1988 for universal access to health Food and housing are scarce, but trouble is care for pregnant women and their infants as a cru- something these women have in abundance. Among cial first step. the project’sclient list are an anorexic chain-smoker “There is an answer,” said commission Execu- in hiding from an abusive partner, a 13-year-old girl live Director Rae Grad, adding that half of all U.S. with an alcoholic mother, and a woman who boasted infant deaths are preventable. “It’s bask, boring, of getting drunk every weekend during her pregstraightforward. It’s feeding women, making sue nancy. Now her fetal alcohol syndrome baby is on they have health care. Making sure their babies ha ve their rounds, too. health care. This isn’t glamorous staff that makes “Being a mother, you feel all mothers want the the cover of Time magazine. But kworks.lt saves best for their babies,” MOM outreach worker Claumoney. And it saves lives.” dia Thompson said. “Then you’ll run into situatkns Indianapolis officials reached the same conclu- where you begin to wonder, ’Now, are they consion. Since then, four new clinks have opened in the cemed at aU stout this child?’But I understand k, dtv. A comnuter network betas track rttients when aw. «n tim