Substance abuse during pregnancy can have a life threatening effect to the unborn baby such as heart attacks, respiratory failure, strokes and seizures. If you drink, smoke or ingest illegal drugs, the fetus does as well. You aren’t only putting your own life on the line, put also the unborn baby. Exposing the fetus to drugs can increase the baby’s chance of being premature, have birth defects, be under weight and possibly cause stillbirths. Babies born by mothers who use drugs often have problems later on in life such as, slower than normal growth, learning and behavioral problems, and can perhaps cause sudden infant death syndrome, which is the unexplained death of a child while sleeping. Nearly twenty percent of women take street drugs
