The State Can Steal Your Baby Anytime They Want with a False Drug Test -The Criminal Drug Testing Market
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. 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. 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, their 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.” 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.
