Hailey Fennell vividly remembers the day she got pregnant with her third baby: It was the first time she used crystal meth.
Fennell, who lives in Belleville, Ont., had turned to the addictive street drug because it offered a cheap high. At that point, she didn?t feel like she had much left to lose. Fennell had suffered through years of bad boyfriends, abuse and a volatile relationship with her mother. To get through all the trauma, she relied on drugs?especially opioids like heroin and morphine?to numb herself. Three years ago, when she came home one day to find the love of her life?and the father of her second child?dead from a drug overdose, she wanted to blur her reality even more.
When she got pregnant for the third time, it was an accident, but it provided a much-needed wakeup call. She had used drugs throughout her second pregnancy and was horrified by the withdrawal symptoms that her infant son experienced as a result. His cry was high pitched and he was writhing in pain, so doctors put the infant on morphine when he was just five days old. Still, he threw up constantly and, by the time he was two months old, had only managed to gain half a pound since birth, bringing him up to eight pounds. ?He was a little skeleton,? recalls Fennell. ?He was starving to death.? As soon as a dollar-store pregnancy test confirmed her hunch, she marched herself to a methadone clinic, where they gave her another test and started her on a regimen of opioid-replacement therapy.
Having al...