What kind of mother

can do this to the baby she bears in her womb?

"They are sweating and crying. They can't breathe. They have fast heart rates, vomiting and diarrhea. We have to actually give them morphine to make their life bearable," said Hay earlier this week.

Drug-addicted newborns suffer everything from drug withdrawal to kidney failure, strokes and heart attacks.

"We need to start doing the same for drug addicted-affected babies, particularly for cocaine, marijuana, crystal meth and heroin," said Hay.

To learn that not only drug-addicted babies are born and have to suffer the consequences of their brainless mothers' recklessness but that their numbers are so high is truly chilling. More chilling, though, are some of the comments to the story. Some people advocate forced sterilizations, some support the idea of criminal proceedings for damage to the unborn, others lay the blame on the insufficient amount of welfare. The same person states:

"It is about addictions and the conditions in society that promote the downslide of women into poverty and despair. Drug addicted women can often barely look after themselves, so the task of nurturing their unborn or newborn is overwhelming and incomprehensible to them. "

[...]

"But a single mom selling drugs can make more in a few days than she can all month on welfare. And the gap between selling and using is small. "

Surely more could have been done earlier to prevent them from beginning to do drugs in the first place. Surely they could have educated about pregnancy prevention, about responsibility to self and others. And surely they could have been educated about the unattractiveness of single motherhood as a choice (and it often isn't). By parents and family first and foremost. By the school system secondly.

However we cannot allow such well-intentioned permissivism to permeate policymaking. The link between poverty, single motherhood and drugs is not causal. You do drugs because you do drugs, period. And while everyone chooses their own poison there's nothing guaranteeing anyone the right to choose anyone else's. While single motherhood is challenging from a work-life balance and financial perspective, there is no situation whereby the only options are either welfare or selling drugs.

I shall not ramble on. But a few key concepts deserve mention:

A) Accepted pregnancy automatically carries responsibility for a being incapable of making autonomous decisions. And despite all the good-ism two months without a period and morning sickness might sound a few bells. Therefore there is a direct responsibility of the mother for consciously destroying her child's physical abilities and such responsibility (or abjuration of) must be accounted for. How, that's up to policymakers and society to decide.

B) The notion of drug use and abuse as a consequence of factors beyond people's control has to be eradicated from the public perception as an obvious, dangerous and destructive fallacy brought by permissivist traitors of common sense and perpetuated by weak-minded mediocrocrats. The needle doesn't find your vein and the spliff doesn't undergo spontaneous combustion. For God's sake do whatever you want with your body and your life, but blame it on no-one but yourself and don't let it maim others.

C) Although the social stigma might lead us to conclude that the problem is mainly affecting single mothers, nothing in the article says so. It could just as well have been future mommy and daddy happily smoking crack in their back garden with their junkie friends. It could have been future mommy and daddy chainsmoking spliffs. This isn't a problem of insufficient welfare. It could be a problem of insufficient treatment. It definitely is, though, a problem of lack of education, lack of character-building, lack of law enforcement and a spreading culture of everything being allowed without the need to face the consequences.

Life is tough. It's tougher when you're weak and ignorant. It's tougher on others when you are irresponsible. All those three notions should be carved in your mind since childhood. And for that last point you must pay.