By Olga Khazan
My story for The Atlantic, Into the Body of Another, looked at how mothers in many states were receiving lengthy prison sentences for abusing their fetuses by using drugs while they were pregnant. Leaving aside the life-at-conception issue, among the things I learned was that drugs differ in the levels of harm, if any, they can cause fetuses. What’s more, many states simply do not have the rehabilitation beds necessary to treat all the drug addicts within their borders, pregnant or otherwise.
While I looked primarily at the situation in Arkansas and Oklahoma, there are many additional ways reporters could focus on this issue. Here are some tips, including a few cautionary tales:
Drugs are bad, but not all drugs are equally bad in the same ways
One thing I see sometimes is an assumption that any drug exposure in utero is bound to cause birth defects. What I learned through my reporting is that meth exposure, in particular, does not tend to be that damaging. It’s actually consider much less harmful, for example, than alcohol, which doesn’t get vilified and/or punished in the same way. The son of the main character of my story is perfectly healthy, and that fact contributes to the moral complexity of this issue.
Not everyone uses the Internet
Photo by J.K. Califf via Flickr.
It was really tough to track down the families of these women. They are in jail, their wardens had not yet granted me access to them, and I only had their names to go on. Their families didn’t seem to use email. I used things like Lexis, Facebook, obituaries, and court records to reconstruct family trees and track down phone numbers. I have notebooks filled with scratched-out telephone numbers that turned out to be disconnected. But if you persevere, you can eventually connect with someone who is hopefully willing to share their story and help provide access.
Reconstruct your character’s life histories
Drug addiction tends to complicate life. It wasn’t until I was midway through my reporting that I realized I didn’t fully understand who these women were and what they had been through. I did a full court records search on all of my main characters and their boyfriends. OSCNnet, Oklahoma’s court-records site, practically became my homepage. Not only did it help me piece together life stories, it also provided details about why children might be worse off in an ex-partner’s custody while the women are in jail.
Cops are people, too
I obviously have a large amount of sympathy for these women. However, one pitfall of reporting on drugs can be disregarding law enforcement and seeking cursory comment at the last minute. One thing that paid off was involving early in my reporting some of law enforcement officials and prosecutors involved in these types of cases. Several were very helpful, answering questions late at night and opening up their offices’ inner workings to me. They have a point of view that, though some may disagree with it, is the summation of all of the extremely dark things they’ve seen drugs do. I tried to let that come through in the piece, even though it lowered the story’s social-justice-warrior quotient quite a bit.
Olga Khazan (@olgakhazan) is a staff writer for The Atlantic, where she covers health. She was a recent finalist for the New York Academy of Medicine’s Urban Health Journalism Prize.
