Methadone Effects on a Fetus

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is John Bosworth. I'm a licensed mental health counselor in St. Pete, Florida. I'd like to speak about the methadone effects on a fetus or an unborn child. Children and unborn fetuses are usually way way more sensitive to any type of drug whether it's legal, prescription, over-the-counter, whatever. A fetus or an unborn child is way more sensitive to the effect of the drug in the system. And if we look at it from a purely pragmatic perspective, an unborn fetus or a developing child, the development is not yet complete, so any kind of adverse effect that would happen in the adult from the drug would actually be much more detrimental to a developing fetus. And let me give you an example. If methadone, which acts on the central nervous system to produce depressed respiratory effects, if there is an unborn fetus, or if the mother is carrying a child, that respiratory is not fully developed yet, especially if it's in the first few months of the pregnancy. What happens is normal development is stunted and that respiratory system will not develop as it should or according to plan so to speak. So what happens is there's two major birth defects associated with methadone when taken during a pregnancy. And the first one is intra-uterine growth retardation syndrome, which means that the... basically kind of sums up what I was talking about before. The uterus does not... I mean the fetus does not develop properly in the uterus because there's too much of the substance and in this case, it's methadone. And also there's a lot of neuro-behavioral dysfunction associated with methadone use in a pregnant mother. What happens also with any other drug, we start to see that there's low birth weight, small head size... So in effect it really just... it adversely effects the development of the fetus and we're not sure specifically how it does it. And research doesn't really allow us to specifically pin point the differences between what the side effects would be in a fetus with methadone or what it might be with alcohol because most people that abuse substances don't just abuse one substance, so it'd be very hard to kind of tease out the different effects of the different drugs. But safe to say that any drug, illegal, legal, over-the-counter, whatever, is not really safe to take... we're not sure of the effects it would have on an unborn child. My name is John Bosworth and I'm talking about methadone effects on a fetus."