She Ate a Poppy Seed Salad. Child Services Took Her Baby.

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

News

4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 7 September 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Pregnant with her fifth child, Susan Horton had a lot of confidence in her parenting abilities. Then she ate a salad from Costco: an “everything” chopped salad kit with poppy seeds. When she went to the hospital to give birth the next day, she tested positive for opiates. Horton told doctors that it must have been the poppy seeds, but she couldn’t convince them it was true. She was reported to child welfare authorities, and a judge removed Horton’s newborn from her care.

“They had a singular piece of evidence,” Horton said, “and it was wrong.”

Hospitals across the country routinely drug test people coming in to give birth. But the tests many hospitals use are notoriously imprecise, with false positive rates of up to 50 percent for some drugs. People taking over-the-counter cold medicine or prescribed medications can test positive for methamphetamine or opiates.

This week on Reveal, our collaboration with The Marshall Project investigates why parents across the country are being reported to child protective services over inaccurate drug test results. Reporter Shoshana Walter digs into the cases of women who were separated from their babies after a pee-in-a-cup drug test triggered a cascade of events they couldn’t control.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Stacey Abrams, Voting Rights Advocate, Author, Admit-Nurd, and now host of the brand new
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0:26.7	Stacy Abrams. Episodes are available wherever you get your podcast. From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is reveal. I'm Al Lettsin.
0:39.2	Imagine you're getting ready to have a baby. You're making plans for how the birth will play out.
0:47.0	Who's going to be there? Making sure you have everything you need to take the baby home.
0:52.0	Car seat, check, diapers. everything you need to take the baby home.
0:52.6	Car seat, check, diapers, check.
0:56.2	Now, imagine the baby is born.
0:59.1	You're in your hospital bed enjoying your newborn.
1:02.3	And a doctor walks in and says,
1:04.4	So I just want you to know that your urine tested positive for drugs.
1:11.2	You posted positive for methamphetamine.
1:14.0	You can leave, but your baby cannot.
1:17.0	This makes no sense to you.
1:18.2	It's totally absurd, but the doctors and nurses, they don't believe you.
1:23.2	I don't know how to defend myself.
1:25.5	What do I do to get out of this situation?
1:28.0	I don't even know how I got into it.
1:31.1	I had no inkling, no idea that we would be fighting for our baby to come home with us.
	...

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