| When the Bough Breaks: From the Introduction | |
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| And so we began the research, a journey that has taken five years to come to fruition in a book. We talked with the women, the mothers. We talked with women who were in recovery and those who were graduates of treatment programs. Women who had struggled to stop using, and couldn’t do it alone. Women whose babies had been taken away. Women who went voluntarily for help, and were refused treatment because they were pregnant, or because recovery programs “didn’t take MediCal.” We heard stories of survival: women who have changed and are changing their lives, and their children’s lives. We also talked to the fathers when we could, as well as to teachers, foster parents, nurses, counselors, social workers, and doctors. |
The women’s stories haunted us, drained and inspired us, spilled into our dreams. We talked to each other of little else. We learned that every tenth baby born in the United States is being exposed to illegal drugs before birth. And that alcohol use during pregnancy is rampant and the leading cause of preventable mental retardation. We also began to piece together an unspoken story behind the story of addicted pregnant women. Over and over, women in recovery talked about how they had been abused as children, many of them sexually abused. At first we were surprised by the frequency of abuse, and then it became obvious: women who had grown up in alcohol- or drugabusing families, and who had experienced child abuse, were dealing with their pain as they had been taught to deal with it. |
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