Research Paper on:
Pregnancy/Women on Drugs

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
wisdom, this sentiment has a great deal of truth in it, but is, nevertheless, most often ignored. For example, one of the most spurned groups of people in society  today is pregnant women and mothers who consume illegal substances while pregnant. The universal consensus is that these women are lower than dirt for endangering the innocent lives of their  unborn children. Countering this sentiment, however, is an informative, well-written study by Sheigla Murphy and Marsha Rosenbaum in their text Pregnant women on drugs: combating stereotypes and stigma. As  to why this book was chosen for this report, the student researching this topic is encourage to voice his or her own reasons for why this book was chosen. A  possible answer however, though certainly not the only answer, is that this book is very appealing because of the way that the authors focus on the women who were interviewed.  It is because of this approach that this text is not a dry compilation of statistics, facts and figures. Rather, the authors do, indeed, allow the readers to get to  know these women, to better understand their life choices and situations. Murphy and Rosenbaum interviewed 120 women (18 or older) from the San Francisco bay Area who were either pregnant  or no more than six months postpartum, who had used "heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine" during their pregnancies and were not in a drug treatment program (163). The authors chose  this sample population because other research has ignored pregnant women who were not in drug treatment. Once the reader learns about the lives of these women, their limited  options, their victimization -- as the old clich? suggests -- it becomes impossible to judge them, only to care about their circumstances and their fate. The data gained from