by Mariah Blake
NARRATION:
Mary Barr is a bubbly 40-something blond with plump cheeks and ice-blue eyes. She's a devoted wife—a silver heart with her husband's name dangles from a chain on her neck. She's also a proud mother.
TAPE:
Sound of her showing pictures and Joseph's shoes
NARRATION:
It's hard to imagine that Barr spent eight years hooked on crack, and smoked the drug through four pregnancies.
TAPE:
With my fourth child I was on the street, I was using every day. I thought there's no way this child is going to survive.
NARRATION:
All of Barr's children were born in the early 90s.By then everyone knew what happened when woman took crack while pregnant--or at least thought they did. The media were flooded with "crack baby" stories. Everyone had seen the television images of the shriveled infants with their shrill cries and herky-jerkey movements. Some contended crack was "killing a whole generation" or "creating a biological underclass." But all of Barr's children seemed healthy from birth.
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They took their formula, they weren't shaking. I though how come my babies didn't come out shaking like those babies born shaking and they don't eat. My babies came out and went to sleep and drank their formula.
NARRATION:
This is not to say Barr's family didn't suffer. She gave two of her children up for adoption. The others were eventually placed in foster care. For three years they bounced from home to home.
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By the last home my daughter called every woman she saw mommy.
NARRATION:
But, today all of Barr's children are healthy. The two eldest are out of foster care and attending a private school in Manhattan, where they live with their father. Barr's 12-year-old daughter is in honors English. Her son, who is 13, is tall and athletic. Many other so called "crack babies" are also thriving. In fact, 30 doctors and scientists from top universities recently sent out an open letter calling "crack babies" a myth and urging people to quit using the term.
Among them was Dr. Wendy Chavkin. She now teaches at Columbia University, but she headed Maternal and Child health for the New York City Health department when the crack epidemic broke out. Early on she gathered a group of doctors to discuss crack's impact on fetal development.
TAPE:
As soon as you started to talk to the neonatologists or the obstetricians who did the follow up..almost immediately it became clear that what was being talked about in the press was not connected to the clinical reality.
NARRATION:
Chavkin doesn't deny that taking crack while pregnant can be harmful
TAPE:
It is true that more of those kids were born pre-term, and as you probably known being born pre-term is the most common final pathway for putting a baby at risk for a whole lot of things.
NARRATIVE:
Some scientists have also documented a mild attention-deficit disorder even in full-term babies born to crack-addicted mothers. But most who have researched the affect of drugs on fetal development say there's far more proof of harm by smoking and drinking while pregnant.
Yet the term "crack babies"—and the stigma associated with it—have persisted. Last month New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch wrote that "crack babies" are a large part of the problem with New York City schools. Two women have been sentenced to prison terms recently because their children were stillborn and they tested positive for crack, although there was no way to prove drug exposure killed their babies. The question is: Why has the concept proven so tenacious?
TAPE:
Once a phrase gets into the language people don't think about what they're doing when they're saying it and writing it and the connection between familiar terms and harmful stereotypes.
NARRATION
Dr. David Lewis of Brown University brought together the signers for the recent letter. He believes the term "crack baby" is harmful to children, in part because once the label is attached to a child people have low expectations of them. This can impact their long-term development.
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If people have low expectations of child development, the child tends to absorb those expectations.
NARRATION:
Others worry the term can be used to mask child abuse. Last October, a New Jersey couple was found to be starving their adoptive children. Their oldest of the children was 19 years old and weighed 45 pounds. Neighbors told the New York Times that the adoptive parents had explained the children's stunted growth by saying they were "crack babies." For Columbia Radio News, I'm Mariah Blake.