Illegal Drugs and Women’s Fertility

While it is already known that doing drugs in general, much less while you are pregnant, is not exactly beneficial to your health, a shocking number of women continue to do both. According to one survey, nearly 5 percent of women admitted to illicit drug use within the past 30 days. Moreover, in a drug screening of pregnant women in New Orleans, 19 percent tested positive for at least one substance. Even more disheartening, none of these women were seeking substance abuse treatment.

It’s safe to go out on a limb here and confirm that most drug abuse is the opposite of what you should be doing during your pregnancy, and different substances have varying degrees of adverse effects on a women’s fertility.

For example, At Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, 17.5 percent of pregnant patients test positive for marijuana.

According to Dr. Ricardo Yazigi, a fertility doctor at Shady Grove Fertility Center in Maryland, “there’s a very old study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology in 1990, that reported that women smoking marijuana had an elevated risk for infertility due to lack of ovulation.”

Dr. Gillian Lockwood, the medical director of the Midland Fertility Clinic in England, explained that, like marijuana, cocaine use can, “suppress ovulation altogether by interfering with the subtle feedback loops which control the ovarian cycle.” Damage to the fallopian tubes can occur, as well as increase the hormone prolactin (which disrupts the hormonal balance and the menstrual cycle) with increased cocaine use.

But that’s not all, in Vermont, about 40 out of every 1,000 babies are exposed to opiates in the womb.

Dr. Lockwood explains that, “since the fetus shares the mother’s blood supply, these drugs will be delivered to the unborn baby at doses that may be lethal and will result in the baby developing severe withdrawal symptoms upon birth.”