Childbirth In The Age Of Addiction: New Mom Worries About Maintaining Sobriety

When she was in her early 20s, Nicole Veum says, she made a lot of mistakes.

“I was really sad and I didn’t want to feel my feelings,” she said. “I turned to the most natural way I could find to cover that all up and I started using drugs: prescription pills, heroin for a little bit of time.”

Veum’s family got her into treatment. She’d been sober for nine years when she and her husband, Ben, decided to have a baby. Motherhood was something she wanted to feel.

If she needed an epidural during labor, Veum told her doctor, she didn’t want any fentanyl in it. She didn’t want to feel high.

“I remembered seeing other friends,” she said. “They’d used it, and they were feeling good and stuff. I didn’t want that to be a part of my story.”

An epidural is a form of regional anesthesia given via an injection of drugs into the space around the spinal cord. It is typically a mix of two types of medication: a numbing agent, usually from the lidocaine family, and a painkiller, usually fentanyl.