This series was produced with the support of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism Impact Fund....
What happens to the growing number of drug-exposed babies? Answers "proved maddeningly difficult to tease out — much harder than we expected," writes reporter Teri Sforza.
Parents can get well. Babies can thrive. Lives can go on.
Parents can feel hopeless when they enter the child welfare system. And things get complicated when California steps in to play parent.
Becoming a new mom is stressful for the best-prepared women; struggling with addiction on top of that can lead to danger for them both.
Over the decade from 2008 to 2017, as the opioid epidemic took hold, the number of drug-exposed infants born per year nearly tripled in California
Project: Born on drugs: Predictions about crack babies didn’t come true, offering hope for opioid era
When the "crack baby epidemic" of the 1980s and '90s was raging, many experts offered stark, long-term forecasts. While those were overblown, there still is cause for concern.
This series was produced with the support of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism Impact Fund.