They followed the doctor’s orders. Then their children were taken away.

Caitlyn Carnahan was a star patient in her Oklahoma City MAT program, where she regularly attended 12-step meetings and passed every urine test. But when someone from the State Department of Human Services arrived in 2019 to question her as she cared for her newborn son in the NICU, Carnahan felt like all of her accomplishments had been erased. The researcher asked why she had taken Subutex, a form of buprenorphine, during pregnancy if she knew it could cause withdrawal symptoms, Carnahan told me. The woman also raised the extensive record of Carnahan’s husband, including three arrests due to domestic incidents when he was still taking opioids. She asked Carnahan why she would be with someone like that. “I can see where she’s going with this, and it was just terrifying,” says Carnahan. “It was like a scary movie.” Her son was in foster care for eight months.

Carnahan’s doctor had warned her that the hospital could call the authorities, but many other women are completely taken by surprise. “I never thought CPS would come to that hospital,” says GW, who had a baby while taking Subutex in Louisiana in 2019. (GW asked to be identified by her initials to protect her child’s privacy). protect.) After her son was removed, GW constantly imagined where he was, what he was doing, and marked a new day without him on a calendar.

Her lawyer begged her to do as the social workers asked. “She would say, ‘Just shut up. Just smile and let it go,” GW told me. Case workers consider a parent’s cooperation to be a key factor in determining whether it is safe to return a child home. Parents who are not sympathetic are often seen as unstable or judgmental.

Once a case is opened, social workers can examine virtually every aspect of a mother’s life: her household practices, her income, her romantic partner, the contents of her refrigerator. In South Carolina, Mary DeLancy, whose newborn son was placed in foster care in 2017, recalled being proud to show a social worker her new apartment, filled with baby toys and stuffed animals, blankets, a crib, and a bouncer — a far cry from the homeless shelter where she previously lived. “It was a big deal,” she said. “We’ve worked really hard to get to that point.” But when the social worker arrived, she pointed to the crib and said it was out of date and needed to be replaced immediately. DeLancy began to doubt himself. “The more a parent wonders ‘Do I deserve my own child?’ the less they try,” she said. “Because they feel like no matter what they do, they’ll never be good enough.”

Even a parent whose newborn is not removed faces a level of scrutiny that is hard to resist. “She’s literally 24 hours old – how am I neglecting her?” Blair Morgan-Dota remembers thinking when she was reported for child neglect after giving birth on Subutex. At first, Massachusetts social workers let her keep her baby, but when the stress of the case proved too much and Morgan-Dota relapsed, the agency removed her daughter and Morgan-Dota resigned herself to her failure. “They make me feel like I’m not a good mom,” she said. “Maybe she’s better with someone else.”