Word: womb
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...dimensions of the tragedy are staggering. According to the National Association for Perinatal Addiction Research and Education (NAPARE), about 1 out of every 10 newborns in the U.S. -- 375,000 a year -- is exposed in the womb to one or more illicit drugs. The most frequent ingredient in the mix is cocaine. In major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Detroit and Washington many hospitals report that the percentage of newborns showing the effects of drugs is 20% or even higher...
Among the most visible victims are black and other minority children born into crack-plagued ghettos. It is bad enough that the drug assaults children in the womb, but the injury is too often compounded after birth by an environment of neglect, poverty and violence. "I sometimes believe that babies are better protected before they are born than they are after," says Dr. Barry Zuckerman, head of the division of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Boston City Hospital...
...spurred the use of other drugs. Women who take cocaine are likely to use heroin to prolong a high, then tranquilizers and alcohol to come down. They may indulge in marijuana, PCP and amphetamines. As a result, many crack babies steep in a stew of drugs while in the womb...
...Schaefer signed a bill last week that would protect a woman's right to have an abortion should the Supreme Court ever reverse its 1973 decision guaranteeing that right nationwide. The law allows abortion without restrictions up to the time a fetus is able to survive outside the womb; after that, an abortion can be performed only to protect a woman's health or when a fetus is deformed. While pro-choice advocates acclaimed the new law, antiabortion groups attacked it. "It will become the most liberal, the most extreme abortion law in the entire 50 states," said delegate Timothy...
...womb is the first home. Thereafter, home is the soil you come from and recognize, what you knew before uprooted: creatures carry an imprint of home, a stamp -- the infinitely subtle distinctiveness of temperature and smell and weather and noises and people, the intonations of the familiar. Each home is an unrepeatable configuration; it has personality, its own emanation, its spirit of place. Nature's refugees, like eels and cranes, are neither neurotic nor political, and so steer by a functional homing instinct. Human beings invented national boundaries and the miseries of exile; they have messier, more tragic forms...