4.6 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2025
⏱️ 27 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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0:00.0 | For a few years now, journalist Shoshana Walter has been obsessed with a test. |
0:11.8 | A test a lot of people get, but very few people know they're taking, unless they fail. |
0:21.6 | Yeah, obsessed is a good word. |
0:25.6 | This test is a drug test, which is often administered when folks show up at the hospital to give birth. |
0:33.7 | Some hospitals test just about everyone. |
0:36.8 | Others are more selective. |
0:39.7 | You know, maybe they drug test women or patients who did not have any prenatal care. |
0:45.6 | I've heard of some hospitals electing to drug test women who come in with bad teeth. |
0:52.9 | It made me really curious about the mechanisms behind how |
0:57.6 | women are being identified at the hospital when they give birth. And what's behind these reports? |
1:05.3 | Why are they happening so often? You can see how this testing could go wrong, right? |
1:13.5 | Like, maybe you test people he just don't like for whatever reason. |
1:18.0 | Maybe the test pops a false positive. |
1:20.8 | Or maybe it's a real positive. |
1:23.5 | Turns out that can be a problem, too. |
1:26.5 | There's multiple reasons why someone could test positive for opioids. |
1:31.3 | One of the reasons is that they're taking a prescribed medication that contains opioids. |
1:36.4 | That might include fentanyl they might receive in their epidurals or morphine that they might receive to help with the pain from contractions. |
1:44.8 | It also could even include possibly the ingestion of poppy seeds. |
1:50.1 | The more Shoshana researched this testing, |
1:53.5 | the more she came to think what hospitals and doctors thought they were giving, |
1:58.2 | day in and day out, was some kind of parenting test. But what they |
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