Addicted at birth: Babies born hooked on heroin quadruples in U.S.

The number of babies born addicted to narcotics in the United States has quadrupled in the last decade, new figures have revealed. The rise is being blamed on a growing epidemic of painkiller and heroin use currently gripping America. Every half an hour, a baby is born in the U.S. craving the drug its mother was addicted to. According to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine, these children are born with crippling withdrawal symptoms because they have become dependent on drugs like heroin and methadone while in the womb.

The cry is a very distressed one, a very high-pitched one and no effort to console seems to help the baby.

Dr Paul Winchester

Sky News was given unprecedented access to a neonatal ward in the Midwest state of Indiana specialising in babies with neonatal abstinence syndrome. “It’s tragic - here we have a mother that’s a drug addict. It sounds bad and so I think we struggle against a natural impulse to characterise the mother as bad and the baby as a victim,” said Dr Paul Winchester, medical director at the St Francis Hospital. In 2001, a single baby was admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit compared to 48 in 2014 - the equivalent of nearly one a week, according to hospital officials.

The guilt is always going to be there and it’s something you kind of have to forgive yourself for. You can’t feel guilt for the rest of your life.

Mother Jessica Barnes, who passed on her methadone addiction to baby son Elijah

Health babies hooked on drugs