Black women were vilified as unfit mothers during the so-called “crack baby” panic, but science—and the lived experiences of families—tell a very different story.
The road to recovery—and the right to recovery—is essential to a free and fair democracy. In honor of National Recovery Month, this installment of Women & Democracy is presented in partnership with the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health at Georgetown Law, exploring the often unspoken intersections of addiction, recovery and gender justice while highlighting public health and policy solutions that prioritize dignity, equity, access to care and civic engagement. Alongside this companion essay collection, Ms. is releasing a multipart podcast mini-series, The Long Way Home, hosted by Dr. Michele Goodwin in conversation with leading experts on recovery. The multimedia collection, The Right to Recovery Is Essential to Democracy, amplifies critical perspectives on race and incarceration, LGBTQ experiences, maternal health and pregnancy justice, and personal storytelling.
In 1999, Regina McKnight, a poor Black farmworker, became the first woman to be prosecuted and convicted in the United States for a stillbirth. A South Carolina court sentenced her to 20 years in prison, suspended to 12 years.
McKnight suffered a cascade of harms and subsequent punishment by the state. She was a 21-year-old rape survivor. The year before she gave birth, she suffered the loss of her mother, killed by a hit-and-run driver. She was no hardened criminal; she had no prior convictions. She suffered from depression and anxiety, which led to self-medication—illicit drugs purchased off the streets of South Carolina. Without her knowledge or consent, McKnight’s doctors turned her medical records and tests over to the police, who, without scientific support, claimed that the stillbirth she endured must have resulted from the illicit substance.
Across the nation in the late 1980s, throughout the 1990s, and into the new millennium, cases like those at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) could be and were easily misread as poor Black women lacking concern, care and discipline for their pregnancies—based on their arrests, prosecutions and plea deals. Journalists could point to the records of arrests and plea deals and draw the conclusion that “a bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth,” lurked among Americans in poor neighborhoods, born to Black mothers.
The award-winning journalist Charles Krauthammer warned that this was “worse than ‘brave new world.’” He interviewed Douglas Besharov, the former director of the National Center on Child Abuse, who originally coined the term “bio-underclass.” Besharov predicted that up to 15 percent of African American children have “permanent brain damage” due to fetal crack exposure—but this was based on no scientific or other empirical data. According to Besharov, “[t]he inner-city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror: a bio-underclass.” Besharov told Krauthammer that this was a particularly acute problem in the Black community.
However, Professor Carl Hart, a behavioral neuroscientist at Columbia University, who investigates neuropharmacological effects of psychoactive drugs, reminds us that “the majority of crack users were white.”
Krauthammer’s reporting fitted the widely accepted and adopted view: a consensus of narratives among journalists published in The New York Times, Washington Post and Rolling Stone, among others, prophesied that “crack babies” would grow up to be “joyless,” their futures would be “bleak,” and schools were destined to be overwhelmed by their presence in the classroom. Some journalists described these babies as having smaller brains, physical abnormalities and various physical disabilities. Krauthammer wrote that infants born to mothers who used crack risked having “abnormal genitals and intestinal organs.” He urged that these offspring would suffer “permanent brain damage.” The future he forecasted included “probable deviance … [and] permanent inferiority.” At best, he predicted, their lives would be “menial.” This, he claimed, was “biologically determined from birth.”
Similarly, journalist Ellen Hopkins wrote in the Rolling Stone magazine that babies born to “crack-addicted mothers are like no others.” She claimed these offspring were “brain damaged in ways yet unknown, they’re oblivious to any affection.” She asked, “how do you care for a baby who hates to be held?” The only problem with this reporting is that it was inaccurate.
Today, Hopkins’ claim that babies born to crack-addicted mothers do not want to be looked at, regarded with affection, or held would be met with serious skepticism.
This would certainly not be said of white babies born to opioid-addicted white mothers. But such reporting was largely unchallenged at the time. The strange conclusion from all of this was that these babies lacked the capacities to appreciate affection or even a parent’s warm gaze and that they were biologically and mentally inferior. In this vein, Hopkins wrote that “[a]ctually any human contact can overwhelm a crack baby.”
By notable contrast, journalists rarely referenced two prominent researchers conducting the most empirically relevant and rigorous studies on fetal impacts from cocaine and other drug exposures: Dr. Claire Coles and Dr. Hallam Hurt. I interviewed both for my book, Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood.
Drs. Coles and Hurt challenged the prevailing anecdotal evidence that linked crack to genetic malformations and chronic syn-dromes in babies and children.
Dr. Claire Coles, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, who also directs the Maternal Substance Abuse and Child Development (MSACD) program at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, studies the effects of teratogens on behavior and development in babies through adolescence. Specifically, her research examines social, biological and neurological development in children prenatally exposed to cocaine, alcohol and tobacco.
Dr. Coles recalled that when she refused to concur with the anecdotal news accounts about babies prenatally exposed to crack, journalists rebuffed her data, dropping her as a medical source or expert. According to her, she was “blacklisted.”
There was a notable difference in the way the media portrayed Blacks and their use of cocaine compared to whites. Dr. Coles told me, “It was a complicated issue. We were studying alcohol and pregnancy. In the ’80s, there was the upswing in cocaine use; it was upscale [and] it was fashionable to talk about it. You could go to a party and people were talking about cocaine. People would wear silver spoons around their necks. It was fashionable [for white people].”
This is an adapted excerpt from Michele Goodwin’s book Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.
