Constructing an Image

By Holly Karibo | Originally published in the Vol. 2 no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2006) issue.

From their first breath they are abused children- thousands of American babies are poisoned in the womb by their own mothers…The chances are good that the mother will give the same welcome to her next child…That is the way it is- poison one child, poison another, keep them all: one of the liberties permitted by American culture and law.[1]

(“The Poisoned Babies” in the New York Times, January 16, 1996)

            The New York Times editorial “The Poisoned Babies” (January 16, 1996) highlights an issue that served to polarize American society during the 1980s: the use of crack cocaine by pregnant women and its perceived effects on American society.  During this period, cocaine became a topic of intense debate within the United States, effectively attaining the title “drug of the Eighties.”[2]  Cocaine, and its derivative, crack, were discussed within a wide variety of contexts ranging from health issues to public policy, and reflected the widespread socio-political transformations occurring throughout the decade.  Media narratives surrounding the supposed crack ‘epidemic’ were produced within the confines of the broader power structures that governed American society.  Newspaper and television reports repeatedly stressed a direct link between the destruction of the ‘traditional’ family and crack use among women, especially within poor minority communities.  Thus emerged the ‘crack mother,’ an expression coined by the media that referred to women who used cocaine or crack during pregnancy.[3]  However, in light of recent scholarly research, the ‘crack scare’ and its images of crack-addicted women and children need to be reexamined.  This paper traces the myth of the ‘crack mother’ as it was constructed within the reality of the power dynamics that governed American society during the 1980s.  When analyzing representations of the ‘crack mom’ in mainstream media discourse, one finds particular gender, race, and class implications that served to reinforce the systematic marginalization of various social groups.  Specifically, the African American, single mom became an iconographic expression of the ‘crack epidemic’; the image of the poor, black mother supported conservative racist and patriarchal ideologies that emphasized the necessity of the nuclear family structure, and the ‘natural’ role of woman as mother and nurturer.  

            Discourse analysis proves to be a valuable lens through which to analyze these racial, gender, and class implications embedded in the media’s portrayal of the crack ‘epidemic’ of the 1980s.  A discursive analysis explores how meanings, narratives, accounts, and explanations create, reproduce, and reinforce social formations and relations of power.[4]  Central to the argument that follows is the idea that discourse is neither ‘mere description,’ nor a simple mirror on ‘reality’.  Rather, as Assata Zerai and Rae Banks argue, discourse is “action oriented”: specific text is either selected or ignored and variation is projected according to the social functions that the discourse is expected to serve.[5]  The result is a constructed version that is comprised of omissions, rhetorical techniques, representations, and other linguistic tools that together shape the narrative.[6]  Importantly, discourse is actively constituted of both social and psychological processes.  The psychological and social fields—individuality, subjectivity, social groups and social categories—are constructed, defined, and articulated through discourse.[7]  Therefore, discursive analysis is particularly useful in analyzing the way in which 1980s media stereotypes skewed the individual identities of female crack users, especially mothers.

            In order to understand the media’s depiction of maternal crack use, it is necessary to situate the discourse within the context of the broader social forces shaping American society during the 1980s.  Perhaps the force that had the greatest affect on issues surrounding cocaine and crack use was the growing power of the self-proclaimed “New Right.”  This burgeoning sector in American society was comprised of far right wing political organizations and fundamentalist Christian groups who felt increasingly threatened by the diffusion of modernist values, behaviours, and cultural practices.  They were particularly concerned with what they saw as the unified forms of 1960s hedonism involving sex outside (heterosexual) marriage and consciousness-altering drug usage.[8]  By the 1980s, the New Right set out to impose what they called “traditional family values” on public policy.  Through the lens of this ideology, most social problems appeared to be simply consequences of individual moral choices; poverty, unemployment, urban decay, school crises, crime and all of their correlating issues were spoken of and acted upon as if they were the result of individual immorality, deviance, or weakness.[9]  The New Right was especially threatening to the rights of women, as they encouraged attacks on daycare, affirmative action, and sex education.  Further, their conservative politics facilitated the emergence of the men’s movement and a correlative assault on non-traditional family forms.  Perhaps the most blatant example of extremism under the New Right was the growing viciousness of anti-abortion zealots, which climaxed in the bombing of women’s clinics and the assassination of doctors.[10]  Rather than focusing on the systemic weaknesses that caused social problems, the New Right encouraged the marginalization of individual people and specific social groups, and in turn created scapegoats that allowed for a conservative restructuring of social and political institutions.  It is within this context that women in general, and poor minority women in particular, became the focus of the crack scare. 

            The discourse surrounding the crack mom was situated within broader discussions of crack as an ‘epidemic’ that was infiltrating American society.  By the mid-1980s, the notion of the crack ‘epidemic’ dominated the mainstream media; few other health-related topics received such widespread media attention.  Despite the fact that national trends in illicit drug use had been decreasing (as demonstrated by national studies and household epidemiological studies) crack use was purported to be skyrocketing, especially in poor and minority communities.[11]  In 1982, the U.S. News and World Report printed an article labeling cocaine “the most tenacious drug habit that we have in the world today.”[12]  Cocaine, and specifically crack, was blamed for threatening the central institutions of American life—communities, families, schools, businesses, law enforcement—and for devastating the urban landscape.[13]  Crack was also blamed for effecting the spread of the urban ghetto into the suburbs.  For example, the New York Times reported that crack was infiltrating a “blue-collar county” two-hundred miles outside Detroit, the “kind of siege that supposedly strikes only the nation’s largest cities.”[14]  The implication of such articles is clear: the problem was no longer just in the inner cities but had begun to penetrate small towns across the country.  Network news teams described crack as the most intense high, including cravings that propelled periodic binge behavior and sabotaged recovery; under its influence people would commit every conceivable act of violence or theft.[15]  National concern about crack use began to centre not only on the devastation experienced by users but by their families as well, and by the mid-1980s, public attention was riveted on the effects of crack on prenatal development, and the surging numbers of what came to be called ‘crack babies.’[16]  From these images of urban disorder, spreading drug use among minorities, and the specter of mindless addiction, emerged the group known as ‘crack mothers.’[17] 

            Recently, however, various scholars have highlighted the ways in which the media distorted the use and effects of crack cocaine.  Drew Humphries argues that the term ‘epidemic’ describes the rapid, perhaps deadly spread of disease, and implies a multiplying risk of infection.  Therefore, he asserts, the term does not accurately describe crack use in the 1980s, as the era actually marked a downturn in the use of illicit drugs, including cocaine.[18]  Likewise, Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine have effectively argued that the crack scare was not merely a rational reaction to a new threat to public health and public order, but instead, must be understood as having its own causes and logic.  They argue that the crack scare played a central role in justifying the war on drugs of the Reagan and Bush administrations, and allowed the administrations to ignore the growth in urban poverty.[19]  As well, Levine and Reinarman argue that crack became the focus of media attention, in part, because it became prominent among a “dangerous group,” among those whom were already marginalized from mainstream society.[20]  Further, Henry Brownstein asserts that the mainstream media also perpetuated the crack scare because it provided a captivating story for readers.  Importantly, he argues that since news media is essentially an economic industry, it is constructed in a political economic context, and is therefore just as likely to sensationalize events as report them.  In this context, news-telling becomes a form of mythological construction, for it is an instrument of propaganda as much as a source of daily events.[21]  In light of such scholastic research, the image of the female crack user must be interrogated, and a gendered analysis must be employed in order to examine and critique the mythic representations of the ‘crack mom.’ 

During the 1980s, mainstream media was instrumental in shaping the American public’s image of cocaine-using women along gender and class lines.  Prior to 1986, women’s cocaine use was described as a ‘growing problem’ across all socio-economic groups from the wealthy and upwardly mobile to welfare recipients.  Citing gender differences in the motivation and consequences of abuse, the reasons given for middle class women’s use of powdered cocaine were their newly won independence and career-related stress.[22]  These images are exemplified by the New York Times article “Women and Cocaine,” published in 1985, which claimed:

In most areas of the country, according to physicians and other drug treatment professionals, the drug [cocaine], with its image of glamour and status, appeals mainly to middle- and upper-income women, mostly under the age of 35, well-educated and involved in competitive demanding jobs.[23]

However, the article continued to explain that, though cocaine use was widely associated with people of the middle class, the drug was working its way down the socio-economic ladder.  The author includes a quotation from the director of a drug abuse treatment centre explaining that the centre was increasingly “hearing from women who say they’ve cashed in their food stamps, spent their welfare checks and have no money with which to feed their children and are beaten up by their angry husbands.”[24] 

            “Women and Cocaine” contains clear gender and class implications that typified the discourse surrounding female cocaine use in the mid-1980s.  In particular, it is important to note how class impacted the ways in which the female cocaine user was portrayed.  In the first excerpt, the author provides some analysis of why it was that middle- and upper-class women were turning to cocaine.  This contrasts sharply with the way in which the lower-income user was presented, namely, in a mere descriptive manner.  In the absence of explanation, the presumption is that there is something in the essence of poor women that leads them to cocaine abuse.[25]  Further, by attributing the causes of women’s drug use to factors such as their high-stress level careers and their newly found freedom, the media was able to reinforce the notion that women function best when in the ‘private’ sphere.  These gendered ideals permeated the media images of female crack and cocaine users, and as a result, the dominant representations such as those presented in “Women and Cocaine” had the effect of both reinforcing traditional gender ideologies, and of furthering the divide between middle and lower-class women.

            The media’s shift in focus from the middle-class cocaine user to the lower-class crack user in the mid-1980s correlated directly with the shift in focus from European American to African American women.  During this period, the media represented cocaine-using women in two dichotomous categories: affluent, European American women who abused powered cocaine, and poor, African American women who abused crack cocaine.[26]  Drew Humphries conducted a study based on eighty-four news segments about women and crack or cocaine aired by ABC, CBS, and NBC from 1983-1994.  According to his findings, between 1983 and 1985, white women made up seventy-five percent of the news stories aired.  However, between the years 1988 and 1990, African American women represented fifty-five percent of the cocaine and crack related stories.  By 1994, this number increased to eighty-four percent.[27]  This dramatic increase in images of African American women using crack cocaine became particularly harmful to women of colour due to the fact that they were coupled with blatantly racist narratives that pitted the middle-class white cocaine user against the lower-class, African American crack user.     

            The racialized representations of crack-using women became obvious in reports such as the 1989 New York Times article, “Deaths of 19 Prostitutes Poses a Mystery in Miami.”   Contrary to the women presented in “Women and Cocaine,” the report focused on lower-class women of colour.  The article reported,

All the dead women, who ranged in age from 14 years to 32, were black, except one, who was Hispanic.  Most were crack users, the police said.  All were found on their backs, with either their dresses pulled up or their pants pulled down; their legs were spread.[28] 

Significantly, crack became a way of justifying the brutal rape and murder of the nineteen women:

The police say they have not abandoned the theory that the women died from the combined stimulation of sex and crack.  While they acknowledged that the levels of cocaine found in the victims were insufficient for an overdose, they say their experience with crack is that a small amount can induce fatal psychotic fits.[29]

The fact that these women were black prostitutes and not white businesswomen directly determined the way in which their murders were investigated and reported.  First, the author of the article makes it very clear that the murdered women were not white.  The article then proceeds to explicitly describe the sexual nature of the violence that led to their death.  However, instead of focusing on the brutal misogyny that led to their sexual assault and murder, the author blames the women for being both crack-‘abusers’ and sexually promiscuous.  Though the police reported that there wasn’t enough crack in their bodies to be lethal, they cite the possibility of over-stimulation caused by having sex while using the drug, effectively accusing the women of being responsible for their own murders.  The racist and sexist implications within the article are clear.  Unfortunately, this was the norm rather than the exception; it was this image of the poor, promiscuous, woman of colour that dominated the representations of the ‘crack mom’ in the eighties. 

            The media rhetoric used to inflate the issue of the crack-abusing mother was framed within the context of fears of social contagion and moral decay.[30]  Metaphoric constructions of the crack epidemic depicted the forces of order about to be engulfed by a “menacing tide” that would “seep into every crack and crevice of American life.”[31]  The language employed in the media repeatedly stressed the plague-like effects that maternal crack-use was having on American society.  The New York Times only exacerbated this pattern.  For example, in the article “Detroit Family in the Jaws of a Monster,” Don Terry reported that, “the Carter family is being stalked here by what the clan’s 54-year-old matriarch, Regina, calls a monster- crack cocaine.  She has watched it swallow her daughter, and now she is fighting for her grandson’s soul.”[32]  Describing crack cocaine as a monster eating away at the soul of innocent Americans was no doubt intended to elicit an emotional reaction from the reader.  As well, it was common to read statements such as “crack babies appear to be everywhere and they will not go away.”[33]  Further, a 1991 report claimed that “no previous drug epidemics had ensnared so many women”[34] as the crack epidemic.  Such rhetoric cannot be viewed as simply presenting the issues at hand, but rather, must be understood as reinforcing the gender, racial and class hierarchies that exist within American society.  The media used the image of the crack mom to reinforce ideologies being espoused by the New Right, which were centred on a belief in the patriarchal nuclear family structure and the ‘inherent’ maternal nature of women.              

            News narratives pertaining to the crack mom were constructed within an environment of increasing conservatism that stressed the need to reassert the patriarchal nuclear family as the centre of American social values.[35]  Although “family values” may reflect many different premises, three interrelated ideas were centrally located within the definition espoused by the New Right: namely, that there was a single, natural family, and that family was both patriarchal and self-sufficient.[36]  Appeals to a rhetoric that reinforces this middle-class family ideal invoke a set of norms, emotions, and values that have consistently been used to oppress individuals and social groups that do not fit these standards.[37]  The media regularly linked single parent homes to forms of child delinquency and deviance, especially when the head of the household was the mother.  This notion is evident in a study conducted by the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA), which states:

            Poor families are particularly hard hit [by the presence of crack within their communities], as their neighbourhoods disintegrate into places of violence and fear.  We, too, should feel fear and anger at what is happening to the vulnerable children growing up in this environment.  They are vulnerable because poor children often live in families headed by women.  And women seem particularly attracted to highly addictive crack cocaine.[38]

Rather than identifying the socio-economic inequalities that lead to poverty, crime, and drug abuse as the reason for the vulnerability of children living in poor communities, the CWLA claimed that children were vulnerable because they lived in a home without a male household head.  Most importantly, contrary to the ideologies underlying the above statement by the CWLA, drug researchers such as Sheigla Murphy and Marsha Rosenbaum have effectively demonstrated that the social conditions of poor women who use illegal drugs, including crack, are more harmful to mothers’ and children’s well-being and safety than drug use itself.[39]  The CWLA statement also suggests an inherent weakness in women, as it alleges that they are more likely to become crack addicts than their male counterparts, a notion linked to ingrained cultural assumptions about women’s ‘remarkable vulnerability’ to addiction and their inevitable downfall once they succumb to intoxicating temptations.[40] 

            This fear of single-mother families permeated the media’s representations of the crack mom.  In a 1987 New York Times report entitled “Crack Addiction: The Tragic Toll on Women and Their Children”, author Peter Kerr drew a direct link between child neglect and single mothers.  Kerr writes:

               So many poor families are headed by single mothers that the sudden increase in women becoming crack addicts has caused disproportionate damage to families, experts say, and produced a rise last year in reports of child abuse, neglect, and death linked to drug use by parents.[41]

The author also included a quote from Dr. Beny J. Primm, the executive director of the Addiction Research and Treatment Corporation in Brooklyn, who stated:

I am worried about the destruction of the nuclear family among black people, particularly in a population where more that half the families are headed by women… It is such a devastating addiction that these people are willing to abandon food and water and child to take care of their crack habit.[42]

Again, race, gender and class intersect as the single, black mother is identified as a major cause of the social problems that occur within poor communities.  Primm reiterates the racist and sexist notion that ‘these people’ (i.e. African American women), will do anything to obtain crack cocaine, even abandon their motherly duties.  The media’s portrayal of the disintegration of the ‘traditional’ family structure was directly linked to fears that women were rejecting their ‘natural’ roles as mothers and nurturers.     

            Furthermore, the gendered ideologies espoused by the mainstream news industry articulated a specific view of substance use that supported the notion that women’s normative role was that of nurturer and caregiver.[43]  As theorized by Marsh, Colten, and Tucker, concerns about women who use alcohol or other drugs are rooted in the perception that such behaviour impairs the performance of their primary role as wife and mother; thus, they are viewed as more sick and deviant than male substance abusers.[44]  The notion of ‘maternal instinct’ was central to the conservative definition of ‘traditional family’; therefore, it is not surprising that a woman’s ‘maternal instinct’ was reported as one of the most serious casualties of crack addiction.  Women who used crack cocaine were repeatedly represented as beyond the call of nature: “So powerful is the grip of addiction that it leaves many of them really unable to fulfill their maternal instinct.”[45]  In its report on crack abuse, the Child Welfare League of America cites an article from The Washington Post entitled “Crack Babies: The Worst Threat is Mom Herself”.  The 1989 article included a quote from Dr. Jing Ja Yoon who claimed, “Crack is destroying people- I have never seen mothers like this before.  Children aren’t being fed, mothers sell their food stamps.  Young women sell their bodies in front of their children.  Even when heroin was at its worst, it wasn’t like this.”[46]  Similarly, a 1990 New York Times report entitled “The Instincts of Parenthood Become Part of Crack’s Toll” focused on the ‘natural’ role of women as nurturer, stating that “the maternal instinct gets blocked out because the only thing that matters is the addiction.”[47] 

            An interesting anomaly exists within the same article: while the title of the report suggests a gender-neutral focus on the effects of crack use on parenting abilities, the actual content of the article focused on the ways in which crack impairs a woman’s ability to raise her children.  Importantly, Nancy D. Campbell notes that the media did not figure men primarily as fathers, nor was any decline in “paternal instinct” suggested, [48] thus demonstrating that conservative gendered notions about the family served to pigeon-hole women as the primary caregivers of children.  Importantly, just as women of colour dominated the images of the single mother responsible for delinquent households, the majority of the ‘degenerate’ pregnant crack users were constructed as single, black women of the lower class.  For example, the 1990 New York Times article “Pregnant Drug Abusers Find Hope in Program” was accompanied by pictures of three women and their babies, all of them African American.[49]  Similarly, a 1989 article entitled “Mothers on Drugs, Addicts at Birth” pictured a (white) doctor holding an African American baby in a hospital.[50]  The implication of the repetition of such images is that it establishes in the minds of the readers a direct relationship between poor black women and prenatal crack use.  Further, repeatedly picturing white doctors caring for children of crack-abusing African American women has the effect of both emphasizing the destruction of the ‘maternal instinct’ of the crack-using woman of color and its connection to the deterioration of the nuclear family in general, as the medical profession and the state is shown as having to step in where a ‘mother’s instincts’ have failed.  Thus, the media’s emphasis on the ‘natural’ role of women as mothers simultaneously encouraged conservative notions of gender roles and the family, while further marginalizing women according to their race and class.        

            The dominant representations of the ‘crack mother’ in the mass media of the 1980s highlight the interconnected relationship between gender, race, and class in American history.  Through re-examining the images and narratives that constituted the archetypal crack mother, it becomes increasingly obvious that the media did not merely present the issues surrounding crack cocaine use, but instead, constructed specific representations that served to support the racist and patriarchal ideologies being espoused by the New Right.  It is also clear that women, and specifically, poor women of colour, became the targets of these ideologies because they would not, or could not due to their socio-economic situation, conform to the rigid social boundaries that required women to uphold their ‘traditional’ roles as wives and mothers, while at the same time, remain economically independent and self-sufficient.  Moreover, the news reports were instrumental in establishing a problem and fingering a culprit while avoiding any in-depth analysis of the broader social issues that perpetuate substance abuse, such as poverty and unemployment; the reports were essentially ineffectual at actually promoting changes that would curb the use of illicit substances by pregnant women.  Thus, the ‘crack epidemic’ of the 1980s is demonstrative of ways in which illicit substances have been used throughout American history to further specific socio-political and economic policies that serve to make legitimate and perpetuate the hierarchical power structures that inform American society. 

[1] A.M. Rosenthal. “The Poisoned Babies: Saving them from their Mothers”. New York Times; Jan. 16, 1996; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851-2002),  A17.

[2] Robert Emmet Long, ed, The Reference Shelf: Drugs in American Society (New York: The H.W. Wilson Co., 1986), 85.

[3] Drew Humphries, Crack Mothers: Pregnancy, Drugs, and the Media (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 19.

[4] Assata Zerai and Rae Banks, Dehumanizing Discourse, Anti-drug Law, and Policy in America: A ‘Crack-Mother’s’ Nightmare (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2002), 43.

[5] Zerai and Banks, Dehumanizing Discourse, 43.

[6] Zerai and Banks, Dehumanizing Discourse, 43.

[7] Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter, Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimization of Exploitation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 12.

[8] Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine, “The Crack Attack: Politics and Media in the Crack Scare” in Reinarman and Levine Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 37.

[9] Reinarman and Levine, “The Crack Attack”, 37.

[10] Angus McLaren, Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1999), 194.

[11] Mitchell S. Ratner ed., Crack Pipe as Pimp: An Ethnographic Investigation of Sex-for-Crack Exchanges (New York: Lexington Books, 1993), 2.

[12] John S. Lang. “Cocaine Spreads its Deadly Net”. U.S. News and World Report; Mar. 22, 1982, p. 27-29 printed in Long, ed, The Reference Shelf, 81.

[13] Cathy Lisa Schneider, “Racism, Drug Policy, and AIDS” Political Science Quarterly Vol. 113, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998) 436.

[14] “Mothers”. New York Times: Aug. 19, 1990; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851-2002), SM34. Emphasis added.

[15] Humphries, Crack Mothers, 47.

[16] Ratner, Crack Pipe as Pimp, 2.

[17] Humphries, Crack Mothers, 47.

[18] Humphries, Crack Mothers, 43-46.

[19] Reinarman and Levine, “The Crack Attack”, 19

[20] Reinarman and Levine, “The Crack Attack”, 19

[21] Henry H. Brownstein, The Rise and Fall of a Violent Crime Wave: Crack Cocaine and the Social Construction of a Crime Problem (Guilderland, New York: The University of Baltimore, 1996), 69-70.

[22] Zerai and Banks, Dehumanizing Discourse, 45.

[23] “Women and Cocaine: A Growing Problem”. New York Times: Feb. 18, 1985; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851-2002), C18.

[24] “Women and Cocaine”, New York Times, C18

[25] Zerai and Banks, Dehumanizing Discourse, 17.

[26] Zerai and Banks, Dehumanizing Discourse, 46.

[27] Humphries, Crack Mothers, 21.

[28] “Death of 19 Prostitutes Pose a Mystery in Miami”. New York Times: Jun. 4, 1989; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851-2002), 24.

[29] “Death of 19 Prostitutes Pose a Mystery in Miami”, New York Times, 24.

[30] Zerai and Banks, Dehumanizing Discourse, 53.

[31] U.S. Congress. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. Role of Treatment and Prevention in the National Drug Strategy, 101^st Cong., 2d sess., 24 April 1990, p. 3 as cited in Nancy D. Campbell, Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice (New York: Routledge, 2000), 173

[32] Don Terry. “Detroit Family in the Jaws of a Monster”. New York Times: Dec. 4, 1995; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851-2002), A12.

[33] “Mothers”, The New York Time, SM34.

[34] Joseph B. Treaster. “Plan Lets Addicted Mothers Take Their Newborns Home”. New York Times (1857-Current File): Sep. 19, 1991; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times, 10.

[35] Susan Faludi. Backlash: the Undeclared War against American Women. (New York: Crown, 1991), 234.

[36] Valerie Lehr, “‘Family Values’: Social Conservative Power in Diverse Rhetorics” in Cynthia Burack and Jyl J. Josephson, Fundamental Difference: Feminists Talk Back to Social Conservatives (New York: Rowman & Littlefield , Inc., 2003), 128.

[37] Lehr, “‘Family Values’”, 130.

[38] CWLA, Crack and Other Addictions: Old Realities and New Challenges for Child Welfare (Washington, DC: Child Welfare League of America, 1990), 4.  Emphasis added.

[39] Sheigla Murphy and Marsha Rosenbaum, Pregnant Women on Drugs: Combating Stereotypes and Stigmas (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 12.

[40] Patricia G. Erickson, Jennifer Butters, Patti McGillicuddy, and Ase Hallgren, “Crack and Prostitution: Gender, Myths, and Experiences”, Journal of Drug Issues, Vol. 30, Iss. 4 (Fall, 2000), 768.

[41] Peter Kerr. “Crack Addiction: The Tragic Toll on Women and Their Children”. New York Times: Feb. 9, 1987; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851-2002), B1.

[42] Kerr, New York Times, B1.

[43] Erickson, Butters, McGillicuddy, Hallgren, “Crack and Prostitution”, 768.

[44] Jeanne C. Marsh, Mary Ellen Colten, and M. Belinda Tucker, “Public Issues and Private Problems: Women and Drug Use” Journal of Social Issues 38 (Summer, 1982), 1.

[45] Campbell, Using Women, 170.

[46] “Crack Babies: The Worst Threat is Mom Herself”. The Washington Post; Aug. 6, 1989, cited in CWLA, Crack and Other Addictions, v.

[47] Michael DeCourcy Hinds. “The Instincts of Parenthood Become Part of Crack’s Toll”. New York Tim: Mar. 17, 1990; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851-2002), 8.

[48] Campbell, Using Women, 171.

[49] Felicia R. Lee. “Pregnant Drug Abusers Find Hope in Programs”. New York Times: Dec. 17, 1990; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851-2002), B3.

[50] Sandra J. Weber. “Mothers on Drugs, Addicts at Birth”. New York Times: Jan. 29, 1989; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851-2002), Ll1.