Crack babies. Fetal alcohol syndrome. Pregnant women using drugs. “What is going on here?” we first asked ourselves back in 1988. Almost daily, in newspapers and magazines, we began seeing articles about “drug babies” and addicted mothers, some of them imprisoned for abusing their unborn children. The problem crossed all economic and ethnic backgrounds. We, like most people, were concerned and confused.

In most of the public discussion there was outrage and a desire to label the women as “bad mothers,” to blame them as the root of the problem and to put them in jail. The focus was on what needed to be done to punish the women, not to help them. There was great concern for the babies, as there should be, but rarely was there any examination of why the mothers were using drugs and alcohol. “What about the mothers?” we asked. “What about the women who were addicted to drugs and alcohol?” It seemed all too easy to blame them, to imply that they were “terrible” women. “What were the mothers’ stories?” we asked ourselves. We wanted to know why their stories were ignored by the media. These women were our sisters, and their lives were invisible. Each woman’s life was being erased by the perception that she was someone’s mother, and not a person herself.

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