NY Senator Seeks to Curb Number of Infants Born with Prescription Drug Addiction
Sen. Charles Schumer of New York is calling on the federal government to help reduce the number of infants who are born addicted to prescription drugs.
Roughly one infant per hour is born with prescription drug addiction nationwide, due to their mother’s abuse of prescription drugs.
Sen. Schumer is urging the Food and Drug Administration to come up with more detailed labels for prescription drugs, which will serve to warn pregnant women about the dangers posed by these medications. The senator is also calling for improved trainings for doctors in terms of recognizing the signs of prescription drug abuse, as well as for the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to put in more funding towards research on pregnancy and addition.
Sen. Schumer shared: “We don’t want to make the same mistake our society made with crack babies where we were too little, too late… We are starting to see the same thing with prescription drugs.”
The Senator was also quoted as saying: “Today we’re urging the FDA, the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration and the CDC, Centers for Disease Control, to take concrete steps to warn women and doctors about the potential harms of taking prescription drugs while pregnant.”
The senator expressed concern over the trend of babies being born already addicted to prescription drugs, saying that the number of these addicted babies have increased significantly, not just in New York, but across the country.
