Skip the Poppy Seed Bagel, or Your Baby Could Be Taken Away

by Alex DiBranco · 2010-11-03 08:29:00 UTC
Topics:

Put down the poppy seed bagel ... now back away ... that's quite the harmful drug you've got there.

Wait, it's not? That's odd. Because Charles Davis reports on the Criminal Justice blog that one mother's bagel craving lead to her newborn baby being taken away.

Three days after Elizabeth Mort and Alex Rodriguez's baby was born, Pennsylvania child protective services arrived to snatch their child away. For five precious days, the panicky parents could do nothing to get their child back. All because Mort had failed an overly-sensitive urine drug test at Jameson hospital, a test that she wasn't informed beforehand was being administered, and had counted poppy seeds among her breakfast of choice.

The Jameson hospital standard for testing positive is less than a sixth of the level the federal government uses on its employees, meaning that any woman with a hankering for a poppy seed — or, oh walk on the wild side, everything — bagel could find themselves labeled a drug user and have their baby taken away.

The ACLU of Pennsylvania’s lawsuit against the hospital and child services alleges that the state “is removing newborns without any reasonable suspicion that they have been abused or are in imminent danger of abuse, in violation of parents' fundamental constitutional rights.” Lawrence County Children and Youth Services (LCCYS) shouldn't have acted simply on the basis of that drug test, when the baby had proved completely clean of harmful substances, but failed to investigate or take into consideration the possible over-sensitivity of the test before whirling the couple's baby away. Especially since one caseworker admitted to the ACLU that taking the baby was a mistake and that this wasn't the first problem they'd had with Jameson hospital, this is an egregious case of state-sanctioned baby-napping.

A policy that criminalizes eating a poppy seed bagel, especially if it has happened to other new mothers before, needs to be changed immediately. Lawsuits can take time, but no other mothers should lose their baby to a bagel craving. Tell Jameson Hospital to raise their drug testing threshold to the established level and be more careful not to report innocent, loving mothers to have their baby unnecessarily snatched away.

Photo credit: AJU_Photography

Alex DiBranco is a Change.org Editor who has worked for the Nation, Political Research Associates, and the Center for American Progress. She is now based in New York City.

RELATED PETITION

Tell Jameson Hospital to Quit Treating Moms Like Crooks
SIGN PETITION
3,994 People
PREVIOUS STORY:
Iranian Woman's Execution for Adultery Imminent
NEXT STORY:
Fox News' Trotta Still Doesn't Get It: I Want Her Rape Apologism Off the Air

COMMENTS (10)

    Comment Policy

    · All fields are required to comment.

    [X]

    Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the campaign on Change.org. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments which, as determined solely in our discretion: (1) are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; (2) include content solely intended to personally attack the campaign creator, (3) are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them; and/or (4) violate our terms of service and/or privacy policy. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion. Please also be advised that: (A) we do not actively curate and/or monitor in any manner whatsoever the comments made on the Change.org platform, and (B) the creator of each campaign on Change.org may remove any comment at her/his/its discretion.