Pregnant and Addicted

Overcoming Stigma to Find Treatment

The small waiting room in the basement of Magee Women’s Hospital in Pittsburgh looks more like a business than a doctor’s office. No nurse behind a glass window guards a back area; there’s just a desk in the corner and 11 chairs along the room’s perimeter. Five women and an older man, all accompanied by babies, sit in these chairs.

They chat casually among themselves—about probiotics and trying solid foods for the first time, donating clothes as their babies grow out of them, Halloween costumes. An easy skeleton, or a more complicated lion?

A visibly pregnant woman in sweats turns from examining a display of pamphlets on one wall. “Do you need an interactive recovery workbook for opioid addiction?”

Another woman stops cooing at her six-month-old to laugh. “I think I’m good at this point,” she says. “It’s been a year.”

Two things are equally true about these women: They are mothers (or soon-to-be-mothers), and they are addicts. They come here to the hospital’s Pregnancy Recovery Center (PRC)—one of the first clinics to provide both medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid addiction and prenatal care/delivery—to manage their addiction during pregnancy and after giving birth.

One thing that draws women to the PRC is its willingness to try new strategies. Methadone has long been the gold standard for treating pregnant women addicted to opioids, but the PRC dispenses buprenorphine…