Pregnancy is not easy for most women, but most understand most discomforts
pass with time or end with giving birth. What happened to the precautionary
principle in pregnancy of no drugs except in extreme life threatening
situations? Judy Ritchie
Read the whole article http://tinyurl.com/2t9p5e
http://www.bestsyndication.com/?q=040407_paxil-birth-defects-during-pregnanc
y-antidepressant-dangers.htm
excerpt:
The Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove, Illinois continues to
recommend that SSRIs be used to treat pregnant women even despite recent
warnings concerning birth defects and other life-threatening disorders in
children born to mothers who took antidepressants during pregnancy. "Any
woman," the Hospital warns, "who is thinking about becoming pregnant, is
pregnant, or had a baby within the past year can be affected by depression
or other mood disorders."
Good Samaritan screens all new mothers, according to a March 1, 2007
Naperville Sun article, and universal screening may soon become state law in
Illinois through legislation called the, Postpartum Mood Disorders
Prevention Act, that was introduced in February 2007. Similar legislation
has been adopted or introduced in several other states.
According to the Sun, if the new legislation introduced in Illinois becomes
law, it will require health care professionals to:
"Assess women for mood disorders at least four times: at a prenatal checkup
in the third trimester of pregnancy, prior to discharge from the place where
they give birth, at the initial postnatal checkup and at every postnatal
checkup until the child's first birthday."
[snip]
“They are trying to talk women into believing they have a mental illness,”
says Karen Barth Menzies of Baum, Hedlund, Aristei, Goldman & Menzies, one
of the attorneys leading the charge against the antidepressant manufacturers
for failing to warn about birth defects. “But the symptoms they are being
told to check for are no different than what any person may feel on a bad
day or when they are under the weather. By their definition, everyone is
mentally ill and should pop a psychotropic pill,” continued Menzies.
Talk about market expansion, even in the best of cases, the odds are fairly
good that a new mother may be in a bad mood on at least one of those 4 days,
leading to a label of “mental illness requiring medication.”
[snip]
"And I'm OK with that," says Jami. Apparently Jami’s psychiatrist didn’t
tell her that she could be placing her unborn child at risk for birth
defects, persistent pulmonary hypertension (PPHN), neonatal withdrawal
syndrome and other potential life threatening defects and disorders.
Attorney Karen Barth Menzies, who represents more than fifty mothers who
were taking Paxil and whose babies were born with birth defects, commented,
“I wish Jami could talk to any mother who has watched her infant undergo
open-heart surgery and then decide if she is willing to take that risk.”
[snip]
Then there is the little matter of prescribing SSRIs to nursing mothers. "No
one yet knows," Dr Jackson warns, "because no one has studied the long term
consequences of administering SSRIs to infants via breast milk."
"It has never been proven," she notes, "that there is ‘no effect’ of giving
infants these drugs during the first months or years of post-uterine
existence."
Furthermore, she says, no one understands how the in utero exposure to SSRIs
changes the wiring of the newborn's brain.
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